Regarding comments about theft... I think plain old vandalism would also be an issue.
>In December 2017, the San Francisco SPCA rented a Knightscope K5 robot to patrol the area next to their animal shelter, including the public sidewalk, to deter vandalism. The SPCA received complaints about using a robot on a public sidewalk where homeless people were encamped, and the robot was covered with a tarpaulin and smeared with barbecue sauce; the SPCA discontinued the contract.
If it can self recharge It would probably make some sense for patrolling property and report suspicious movement. To do that however it should be 100% trustworthy, that is, no mysterious Internet connections to phone home, no closed phone apps, etc. and the user should be able to integrate it with any video surveillance system in place, program it extensively from the paths to follow to associating sensors signals to events, alerts etc. That way it could also become useable aside the fact that it is indeed an engineering marvel.
Another possible use is helping blind people to walk around, however to do that it should become good at leading by finding the right path, not just following an human.
I love that in the future this will be a distinction which will have to be made
* unpredictable behavior within boundaries
* possible to alter behavior through repeated action (training)
* diversity of response to novel stimuli
Ultimately, what is it about a dog that makes it lovable? If we can replicate that and exploit the human desire to personify and love anything, we could create pets with intermediate intelligence and I think many people would enjoy that.
The actual product risk, I think, is making the robotic pet too useful. I suspect that would transform the pet into a tool. For instance, a robotic pet that reacts strangely and hides before the human owner detects a thunderstorm is far preferable to one which (using its link to the Internet) says “Thunderstorm approaching; batten down storm shutters”
The imperfection of understanding and the fact that the pet is a net cost center are two things that I think are crucial to mass market robotic pet adoption among those who desire companionship.
It's masturbation vs sex, video games vs life, humanity vs borg-like collectivism.
If your friends are going to be machines, why not plug into a matrix like virtual reality where you can just live out your wildest dreams? Well, because it's fake.
To me, nothing has meaning without the constraints of reality and relationships to other biologic beings. That said, I suppose there may be a day when machines are even more sentient than I. Still, until I'm convinced there is a 'ghost in the shell', I just don't want it.
But then fooling humans into believing that about a robot dog is kinda your point I suppose. I just don't see the need other than some tech cos profit, and I find replacing a real dog with a contrived copy a bit cold.
Many of the dogs are accompanied by notes written by their former owners. “I feel relieved to know there will be a prayer for my Aibo,” one said. Another wrote: “Please help other Aibos. My eyes filled with tears when I decided to say goodbye.”
I agree it’s early enough that the tangible uses for this type of tech are still a bit blurry to us. But I also think this is a bit like saying “is there anything a car can do for me that my legs can’t do?”
It depends on what criteria you evaluate it on. Yes you can move from A to B on your own steam, of course. But automation is incremental. These things aren’t a significant obvious benefit, until they are.
Scalability is one thing. Comparing writing notes in my iPad to writing them on paper, at first glance doesn’t look much different, apart from that the iPad can effectively store a lifetime worth of notes, easily searchable, shareable, linkable etc. Its scalability potential (for this use case) is almost infinite.
When evaluating these sorts of things it’s worth bearing in mind the “leverage” that the tech might give us, that we didn’t have before. This scalability/leverage benefit is often not immediately obvious until you look a little bit below the surface.
This robot dog might start off by carrying your water bottle but later it might be able to also carry a foldable chair, a waking stick, food and water, and a communications device, suddenly meaning that someone with limited mobility can actually go out for a walk on their own and have everything they might need carried alongside them as a mobile support system. That person just gained a little bit of extra freedom. At the enhancement end of the spectrum, an athlete could use this “support robot” to extend the possible range of their training runs.
I do wonder about the near term use cases for this sort of tech (at this price point) for people with disabilities of various kinds.
Often leading edge tech starts out in the realm of compensating for disabilities for a smaller audience before progressing to being looked upon as an “enhancement” for a wider audience (because it becomes affordable enough and useful enough to start to appeal to people who don’t need to compensate for any particular issue but see it as a net convenience worth paying for).
While $2700 is way out of my price range -- handicapped people tend to have tight budgets -- I can absolutely see a tremendous market for companion animals for people allergic to animals, with a dog phobia etc.
Especially if they could add some fetching capabilities, this could be enormously useful to many people. Our population is aging and unlike other populations with physical limitations, people whose limitations are primarily age related sometimes have money. Sometimes lots of money in fact.
But if you live in car dominated sprawl then idk.
It could also be an effective scarecrow I imagine. When planting certain things it would be nice to reliably keep the birds and varmint away.
Out of all animals, the one that most closely fits the bill of "does exactly what you tell it to do" is dogs, and I would argue that's exactly why it's so popular.
But awesome security implications.
Can we say the same thing in the future? If a child is given a pet robot will they get bored of it like a toy or will they come to see it as a life long companion?
This isn't industrial espionage is it?
Is Boston Robotics trying to recover R&D for everything else they do?
Ben Katz has an amazing blog[2] which if you dig through you can read about a lot of the design decisions and testing for the mini cheetah.
Funny enough, after designing the mini cheetah for his master's thesis Ben went to work for Boston Dynamics (I think he started there two or three years ago).
0: https://github.com/mit-biomimetics/Cheetah-Software
The other thing to keep in mind is that this ad might be showing the best-case operation. On the other hand, the Spot has been extensively used/tested by customers already.
Maybe not in this iteration, but why not? There are already robotic seals[0] for companionship, so a robotic dog doesn't seem too far off.
Bittle is obviously not of the same size as the Go1 so won't be suited to the same practical tasks but if you're looking at exploring the control aspects it would serve as a good platform to learn on (for a substantially lower initial outlay). Petoi has the OpenCat repo and there are plenty of ways to hook it up to additional sensors or a remote system for more advanced guidance etc.
Edit: Mine arrived on Friday. It's great, although putting it together had a few challenges (the springs are a tough fit, but people figured workarounds on the forum)
You have to replace your phone every few years, imaging that with a dog. Then think about the dollar and environmental cost of throw away tech devices.
It’s not uncommon for a hiker, particularly an elderly one, to stumble and slide downhill off the trail and be unable to make it back up due to an injury.
Just last Fall my wife and I came across a man whose horse had stumbled during a stream crossing and had fallen down a hill. The man had a torn ACL and couldn’t get out.
Had we and some passing trail runners not found this man, he would have certainly died that night as he had no gear, was soaked wet, and it was going to be well below freezing.
Imagine if the parks service just had a robot dog to do a final patrol of the trail at sundown, maybe with some thermal cameras or something.
I mean a $3,000 water bottle holder...
I would like to know what was meant here -- software was the biggest cost?
Most likely because everything you could need in the software world is free (eg Tensorflow, CUDA, etc). Everything to do with hardware is very expensive (Altium, Proteus, Simulink, any sort of CNC control).
Serious question - where is the disconnect with Chinese OEMs not being able to do basic spell / grammar checking?
Western copy writers and copy editors are expensive by Chinese standards and access to them is hard for a Chinese firm.
In the marketing material they say that the processing power compares favorably to a TX2, but it looks like their $8.5k model is using Nano and/or NX.
The implications for a surveillance society are pretty intense though, but it can easily clean up tough neighborhoods where deterrents are necessary sadly.
I can also imagine pull over stops where the robot engages the passenger first, and is only equipped with a taser. You basically take the human out of the equation so there is no fear of getting shot by the officer or the passenger.
$2.7K is cheap enough for enough consumers to purchase to give them the economies of scale, profit and R&D capital, that you can’t get with selling $70K industrial units.
I can't see myself buying a $2700 piece of tech that can only be used in ideal conditions. Seems like a novelty item at this point.
Ah, another other model Aliengo up to 4.5 hours of battery life.
