In buying Boston Dynamics, Google has gained an impressive edge in robot locomotion.
Google’s remarkable push into robotics continued today with the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, a particularly exciting—and potentially important—company.
Boston
Dynamics creates legged robots with eerily life-like running and
balancing abilities. These machines are more than just spectacular feats
of engineering, though; they embody a powerful approach to robot
locomotion, one that might have an big impact on the way future machines
move around our world.
Google is making a big drive into robotics. It has
acquired seven other other robotics startups in recent months as part of
an effort led by Andy Rubin, the man who previouslyled the development
of the Android mobile operating system (see “Why Google is Buying So Many Robotics Startups”).
Google hasn’t yet said what it plans to do with the robotics
technologies it has acquired, but they include manipuation, vision, and
other areas of innovation that are likely to become increasingly
important. Although Boston Dynamic’s machines can bound across wild
terrain, and run at great speed, the approach it has pioneered could be
useful for more mundane purposes, like climbing a flight of stairs, or
staying balanced when accidentally shoved.
Boston Dynamics was
founded by Marc Raibert, a roboticist who developed a new approach to
legged locomotion in the 1980’s and led research labs at CMU and MIT
dedicated to building walking machines. At a time when most walking
robots were rigid and moved slowly, Raibert sought to mimic biology,
devising engineering principles that made it possible for machines to
remain stable on uneven or treacherous terrain using dynamic principles.
Like living creatures, Raibert’s robots moved quickly and continually,
and stored energy in their limbs. His first dynamic robot was a
one-legged machine that kept from falling over simple by moving its leg
as it bounced around.
Raibert left MIT and founded Boston Dynamics
in 1992, initially to develop simulation software. But the company soon
began building robots based on his dynamic balancing ideas. Its YouTube
videos show the astonishingly life-like results: a St. Bernard-sized
four-legged robot, called BigDog, walking across all sorts of treacherous terrain, and a slightly larger robot, called WildCat, running about the company’s car park at about 30 kilometers per hour.
Most recently, Boston Dynamics developed a humanoid robot called Atlas
for a DARPA challenge designed to foster the development of robots that
can perform rescue missions in environments like Fukushima (see “Meet Atlas, the Robot Designed to Save the Day”). Most of these robots were developed largely with funding from the military.
The
technologies developed by Boston Dynamics could be significant because
most robots cannot cover uneven terrain. The few mobile robots that
exist today, such as the bomb-disposal bots used by the military, tend
to travel using wheels or tracks.
In recent weeks I’ve visited
Boston Dynamics several times to see Altas, WildCat and other Boston
Dynamics robots in action. Significant challenges remain, including
making its hydraulic actuators more efficient and making its robots
quieter. But the company is already making impressive strides in these
areas.
“It has been a great time at Boston Dynamics, getting the
robots this far along,” Raibert told me via email. “Now we are excited
to see how far we can take things as part of Google.”
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