Boston Dynamics has the mission to make marketable robots

We are watching videos that show off the ingenuity of newly developed robots on social media. Most of these shares belong to Boston Dynamics robots. Robots that run fast, open the door, load, or even flip over can soon start roaming between us.


Boston Dynamics, founded in 1992, purchased by Google in 2013 and then sold to Softbank in 2017, has been working on animal and human-like robots for many years. Boston Dynamics's robot videos became so popular that a parody robot video prepared last month was thought to be read by many and shared on social media. 

A number of industry names will say that working with robots is a very difficult task, due to several factors, be it research and development, for financial reasons - many companies fail because investors give up in the middle of the road - and require leadership committed to the projects, highly qualified team and product and market strategies combined with perfect execution.

After a long period of R & D investments, the company is now ready to launch its first commercial products. Although the company is preparing to launch its four-legged dog-shaped robots, the exact date and prices of the products have not yet been announced. However, the robots will be available in 2019, according to The Verge.

Last April, the company's CEO, Marc Raibert, announced that they will launch 100 units of SpotMini robots in mass production and will launch in 2019, whose videos are well-liked and even included in a photo with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Boston Dynamics had made similar statements before, but we haven't been able to see its products on the commercial market yet. However, according to the latest news from The Verge in 2019, we will be confronted with these robots.

Boston Dynamics, which recently acquired the company Kinema Systems, working on autonomous technologies that facilitate the use of robots in warehouses, quickly enters the logistics sector and invests in the digitalization of the sector.

Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for the Advancement of Automation, agrees that it is a "good sign" that more companies than just Boston Dynamics are involved in the creation of leg robots, such as Spot, although it can not project if they have a future due to hardware issues.

Mobility Challenge: 

One of the main challenges for Boston to reach this level is mobility. This is the real challenge that Spot's arrival can provide. There is a physical obstacle, depending on the area they occupy and the fact that many solutions are still static.

This limits its use to factories and other industrial applications, which give little intelligence to the robot, which is in the same place, performing repetitive tasks. The idea is that the next generation of robotics is agile and dynamic, able to work with humans and react to changes in environment and behavior.

Boston Dynamics has been trying to break the mobility barrier for decades, but it seems like the time is right. Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics, believes that Spot is for robotics what Android was for the smartphone industry: a customizable platform that other companies can use to address specific needs.

 "We have designed specifically as a platform so that it can be customized for many different users. In a very short time frame, we will have several different attachments that can be used to customize the robots. " 
Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics

If Boston Dynamics's commercial sales succeed, we may often begin to encounter humanoid, or at least dog-shaped, four-legged robots that will pass by us on the road soon.