Google announced that they’ve acquired Boston Dynamics, creators of quad- and bi-pedal robots like Big Dog and PETMAN. This is Google’s eighth robotics acquisition.
The company did not disclose the details of the sale.
The announcement appeared in the New York Times where Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert said they would honor their DARPA military contracts although Google will not officially be a military contractor.
The company, founded in 1992, has been working on standalone, gas-powered robots for the past decade. The robots are self-righting and very resilient. Robots like Big Dog can throw cinder blocks, handle rocky terrain, and run at 16 mph.
The man behind the acquisition, Andy Rubin, stepped down as head of Googe’s Android business in march after turning a little-known mobile OS into a juggernaut. “His last big bet, Android, started off as a crazy idea that ended up putting a supercomputer in hundreds of millions of pockets,” wrote Larry Page on his Google+ page. “It is still very early days for this, but I can’t wait to see the progress.”
Kill your mule because Budgee Bot is the first consumer-oriented pack-bot designed for the average user. This twee little robot has a basket and a motorized platform and will follow you anywhere, carrying your shopping, luggage, and pets behind you like a robotic sherpa.
The robot holds up to 50 pounds of stuff and you can close it up into a small five-pound bundle. It can sense bumps and cliffs and it has an auto-follow system that will look for and maintain a safe distance from you and your phone. He also loves you.
Budgee Bot cares about you and wants to be your friend. Each day he greets you and does his best to cheer you up! His favorite place is to be with YOU!
If you’ll recall robots like Big Dog were originally designed to act as pack animals on the battlefield. Budgee Bots’ creators, Five Elements Robotics, have taken that idea to its obvious consumer conclusion. You can see a few more pictures of the finished product at Spectrum.
The company is looking for a November crowd funding launch and Budgee Bot should cost about $1,400 when it’s finished – quite a bit to pay for a little robotic Dobby.
Welcome to our continuing series featuring videos of robots that will, when they become autonomous, hunt us down and force us to work in the graphene factories of Mars. Below we see Wild Cat, a fully untethered remote control quadrupedal robot made by Boston Dynamics, creators of the famous Big Dog. This quadruped can run up to 16 miles an hour and features a scary-sound internal gas engine that can power it across rough terrain. Wild Cat was funded by the DARPA’s M3 program aimed at introducing flexible, usable robots into natural environments AKA introducing robotic pack animals for ground troops and build flocking, heavily armed robots that can wipe out a battlefield without putting humans in jeopardy.
Next up we have ATLAS, another Boston Dynamics bot that can walk upright on rocks. Sadly ATLAS is tethered to a power source but he has perfect balance and can survive side and front hits from heavy weights – a plus if you’re built to be the shock troops of a new droid army. ATLAS can even balance on one foot while being smacked with wrecking balls, something the average human can’t do without suffering internal damage. I can’t wait for him to be able to throw cinder blocks!
Finally we present these charming self-assembling robots from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which we covered earlier today. The robots exert an internal force to spin and then connect with each other using magnets, allowing them to fly into the air for a second and then fall down next to their brothers and sisters in exactly the right spot. This allows these completely featureless squares to form any shape they want and, like autonomous LEGOs, they can build complex devices out of a few simple shapes.
“There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” said researcher Kyle Gilpin. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”
They may look innocuous but imagine these things self-assembling into, say, a wall, a door, or even a plate of explosives. They could sneak through pipes into your home and create a robotic assassin to destroy you in the sleep, thereby freeing up your “Schlafplatz” for other humans who have been reduced to sleeping out of doors after the robots took over most habitable locations for the storage of fermenting human slurry. Stay frosty, humans!
PETMAN is a humanoid robot made by Boston Dynamics. BD also created Big Dog, the quadrupedal, brick-throwing robot that haunts our dreams.
This robot, shown here gussied up in a hazmat suit and gas mask, however, is far scarier. While I doubt he can do much right now without those cable support, just imagine PETMAN bopping up to you on a mission to keep you from entered a contaminated zone. First, he looks surprisingly life-like in this outfit and, second, he would be completely deaf to your entreaties. As they say, we’re living in the future. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog was already one of the most advanced—and terrifying!—robots on the planet. Well, it just got scarier, because now it can accurately throw cinder blocks at you while on the march. More »
It’s the sort of ceremony that’s so magical it can only occur on even-numbered years. Inventors, educators, entertainers, college students and media folk gathered at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA tonight for the 2012 inductions to the Robot Hall of Fame, a Carnegie Mellon-sponsored event created to celebrate the best of our mechanical betters.
This year, the field included four categories, judged by both a jury of 107 writers, designs, entrepreneurs and academics and the public at large, each faction constituting half the voting total. The show kicked off, however, with the induction of 2010 winners, the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the da Vinci Surgical System, iRobot’s Roomba, the Terminator and Huey, Dewey and Louie, a trio of robots from 1971’s Silent Running.
The first ‘bot to secure its spot in the class of 2012, was the programmable humaoid Nao, from Aldebaran Robotics, which beat out the iRobot Create and Vex Robotics Design System in the Educational category. The PackBot military robot from iRobot took the Industrial and Service category, beating out the Kiva Mobile Robotic Fulfillment System and Woods Hole Oceanographic’s Jason. Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog ran over some stiff competition in the form of Willow Garage’s PR2 and NASA’s Robonaut to win the Research title. And WALL-E triumphed over doppelganger Johnny Five and the Jetsons‘ Rosie in the Entertainment category. Relive the festivities in four minutes after the break.
Boston Dynamics keeps refining its Legged Squad Support System, the robotic quadruped descendant of the good old and creepy Big Dog. The new version of the eerie mechanical horse, which will aid US Marines squads once finished, got some cool upgrades. More »
Big Dog is the huge quadrupedal robot that stomped its way into our hearts a few years ago with its wild gait and hydraulic whine. Now, however, there’s a new Dog in the mix, the StarlETH, a smaller robot made at ETH Zurich. This guy may be tiny but he’s uniquely suited to running through and over obstacles and in environments that Big Dog may not be able to tackle.
This wee robot can right itself if it falls and runs at 1.5 mph. It also handles obstacles a bit better than Big Dog and has improved hip movement. You can see it fall below – it has active and passive damping so it can either right itself in one motion or bounce around a bit to fix its gait.
Starl stands for Series Compliant Robotic Leg and is designed to handle multiple terrains and environments. It’s a bit small right now but scaling this monster up should give Big Dog a run for its money.
It’s that time again: time for Carnegie Mellon to roll out the red carpet and welcome the crème de la crème of the robotics world into its halls. Since 2003 the school has been selecting the best of the best and inducting them into the Robot Hall of Fame. Past honorees have included everything from LEGO Mindstorms to the Terminator. This year’s list of nominees is no less impressive, with celebrity bots Johnny 5 and WALL-E pitted against each other in the entertainment category, while NASA’s Robonaut takes on the PR2 and BigDog under the banner of research bots. There will also be two other inductees awarded a spot in the hall in the consumer and education category and the industrial and service field. Best of all, for the first time ever, Carnegie Mellon is letting the public vote on the inductees. And, while PETMAN was snubbed yet again, he’s not letting that get him down — the Boston Dymanic’s biped just keeps on struttin’. Hit up the source link to cast your vote before the September 30th deadline and check back on October 23rd to see who’s granted a podium speech.
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