Boston Dynamics Founder Talks About The Future: Robots Can Do More Than Dance

What will the robots of the future look like? 

Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert recently revealed his vision for the future of robotics: Robots can do more than just dance...

When Marc Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, he wasn't even sure it could be a robotics company. Today, Boston Dynamics has successfully launched Atlas biped robot and Spot quadruped robot, becoming the absolute authority of foot robots.

01 Move from practical technology to strategic vision

With a technical background, Raibert became more interested in pursuing his long-term vision for robotics as the company scaled up and became commercially available.

To that end, Raibert founded the Boston Dynamics Institute for Artificial Intelligence in August 2022. The institute is funded by Hyundai Motor, and the first few projects focus on making robots useful outside the lab by teaching them to better understand the world around them.

Raibert hopes to teach robots to watch humans perform tasks, understand what they see and then do it themselves, or know when they don't understand something and how to ask questions to fill in those gaps; Another goal of Raibert is to teach robots to inspect equipment to determine if it's working properly, and if it's not, determine what's wrong with it and repair it.

These visions represent Raibert's forward-looking vision for the future of robotics. By giving robots the ability to "observe and learn," they can get rid of the constraints of being strictly programmed and achieve more autonomous and flexible operations, which requires the establishment of powerful computer vision and knowledge representation systems, and is an important step toward achieving general artificial intelligence.

At the same time, if the robot can detect and repair faults autonomously, it will significantly reduce maintenance costs and achieve a higher level of automation, but this requires a deep understanding of how the device works, and there is a large amount of data accumulation of anomalies, and there are also challenges in terms of safety.

In short, Raibert wants to take robotics to the next level and make it universally adaptable.

02 Five questions about the next development of robotics

Question 1: Why did you share your vision of future robotics more with the outside world when you were in graduate school?

Raibert: At Boston Dynamics, I don't think we talked about the vision. We just do the next thing, see how it goes, and then decide what to do after that. I was taught that when you write a paper or give a speech, you should show the work you've already done and that all that really matters is the data in your paper. Sure, you can talk about what you want to do, but people often talk about all sorts of things that way... The future is so cheap and variable.

That's different than showing what we've really done at Boston Dynamics. I'm proud to be able to showcase what we're doing here at Boston Dynamics. But if you're going to build a robotics lab, and you want to do it quickly from scratch, you have to paint the vision. So I'm starting to feel more comfortable doing that, not to mention that we don't have any actual results to show at the moment.

Currently, robots have to be trained repeatedly to complete specific tasks. But Marc Raibert wants to give robots the ability to watch humans perform tasks, understand what's happening, and then perform tasks themselves, whether in a factory or at home.

Question 2: The Institute will put a lot of effort into robots to better manipulate objects. What are the opportunities?

Raibert: I think people have been working on operational research for the last 50 years, but not enough progress has been made.

I'm not criticizing anyone, but I think so much work has been done on path planning, but that's not where it's at. One idea is that moving from static robotic operations to dynamic ones could advance the field in the same way as moving from static to dynamic foot robotic landing technology.

Question 3: Is there any concern that the public will have a negative view of robots, especially if they are self-developed?

Raibert: Stories about people's fear of robots are sometimes exaggerated in the media.

I think, in general, people do love robots. Or at least, many people may like them, even if they are sometimes afraid of them, but I think people just need to be more aware of robots.

Question 4: What do you find interesting about dancing robots?

Raibert: I think there's a lot of opportunity for robots in terms of emotional expression, but there's a lot of unfinished work in that area. Right now, creating these performances requires a lot of human work, and the robots aren't sensing anything, they're just playing back behaviors that we've programmed. But they should be listening to the music, they should see who they're dancing with and be in tune with it.

I must say, every time I think about this, I wonder if I'm getting weak because robots because robots have emotions, both on the giving side and on the receiving side. But somehow, it's fascinating.