Engineers in this field, who is developing all sorts of machines that can do new functions in the work place. And were gonna demonstrate that well. So please welcome to the stage, marc raibert, who is the founder dynamics. Of boston hes going to be entertained by a columnist at the wall street journal. [applause] marc, im not sure i belong you most certainly do. But we have a its great to be here. Guest, ie a late believe. One more guest. Wed like to welcome to the room. Are. Ot, wherever you come on in, spot. The robot, who is walking in from the back. Thele sitting close to aisles should keep their hands in their laps, please. Spot doesnt piet but and danielle is operating spot for the show. You must be sensational at parties with thing like this. We actually, at thanksgiving, home. One at and it was great fun. Spot is a very exciting robot first, because its our robot product. Weve been shipping it for about two months. So let me tell you a little bit about it before we get started with the interview. This demo, danielle is driving. Shes got a radio link to the robot. But the robot has got its own brain and theres a couple of there. Rs in pretty beefy computers. There is a bunch of cameras. On each side,ra two on the front and one on the for doing it uses forking things like navigating up the stores. Cool things about a legged robot, it not only can can drive sideways, turn in place. I think danielle about did that. This is a really small stage for doing this. It can pitch and roll the body and thats really important you have an arm. Im going to give you all an assignment for lunch. And that is to sit at the table and keep your shoulders still your water reach glass and youre going to learn incapableand really your arms are by themselves. But if you have your arm on a can pitch, roll, then you really have expanded the dramatically, make the arm more useful. So this is a mobile manipulation somem thats got perception capabilities. Although danielle was driving got autonomy functions that let it travel around the space that weve mapped and theres some cool thisination a robot like can do, which is my favorite thing, called chicken head mode. You notice its holding its hands, which you can think of as a head, if you want. Holding its hand still while it. Body moves around it really lets us think about the task were doing with our hands even though our bodies are part of the equation. So theres some technology for thingsating and allowing like that. How long has spot been in development . This in two weeks obviously. All in, how long did it take you to get this up and running . About 10 years ago, we developed a quad pedestrian with darpa funding. Big dog. That was big dog. Professor where peds inome running quad my life. Through about four generations of machines, each way. At things a different big dog had a gasoline engine. Batteries. It was high drallic. This is hydraulic. All electric. Canf i wanted to get these, you put me in one of these today . Whats the wait . About 45 days. Selling them into an Early Adopter Program where the customers weve been trying customers that have verticals that we think have potential for lots of growth. So weve been selling into construction sites, data aquisition, which is burgeoning field where people mount their own sensors and data or 360er 3d imagery, things like that, so progress of aor construction site or do asbuilt data collection. Weve been also working with gas and oil. Refinery most of the refineries weve seen so far were built years ago. Theyre not digitized. And theyre really hard to get around. Really no other robot besides one like this, that can go to the cat walks and all the places in order to do gauges,sensing, read things like that. Whats the benefit to Something Like this vs. A drone . Well, you know, drones are great. They have a lot of access. Theyre short their short operation times i think 30 is the max some of which has to be getting there, getting back. This can carry about 25 pounds payload. This is designed as a platform. Actually what looks like a roofe roof rack on the back we can mount your own hardware. Its got a programming api. Can i get it in red . We actually have christmas that have changing lights and stuff. No kidding . On my celli have it phone. You can see the video. Were going to take spot out in the lobby after the talk. Handsonnt to get some experience, well have it out there for half an hour. Think right after this talk so you can drive it around or lots pose for like to selfies, things like that. I dont know how we follow that mark but were going to try. Have a seat here. Yeah. Itsbeen telling people, like an organ grinder and a monkey, having the robot. Is, who is the then grinder and who is monkey . Lets talk pricing. The word i heard is you can get a spot for about the price of a midrange car. Accurate . Thats accurate. Right now were leasing and doing deals with each person depending on how many they want, what kind of support they get. Were not announcing the price. But its about the price of a midsized car. Car. C. E. O. s less than that. Car. Managers now, you mentioned this at the top, that every you know, an exciting time for your company. You have been known in the world as kind of the dream factory and people would see the videos and get very excited about it. You are out in the world. Youre getting the feedback. The blue birds are coming back field. E what are you learning about your product now that people finally have it . Know, its been fantastic. Providingn to just feedback that lets us improve the product, were also experimenting to find out where the market is. Were not like a normal company marketuld go find a first and design a product for it. Were kind of robot first worse. For better or for so having this platform that can be adapted for lots of different verticals is an opportunity to see whats out there. So, you know, we sort of in advance thought that gas and oil, public safety, which means police, bomb squad type stuff, construction, and some amount of entertainment we have some big entertainment customers were working with we thought those would be the big things. But were really looking forward to seeing what comes in that we of. R thought wait a second. Youve done something with Cirque Du Soleil. Business . Whats going on . Were going to probably get into show business, yes. Project with Cirque Du Soleil p. I think the video is online if you want to find it. Ave not the robots doing little bit of dancing. But we do have customers who are applications,er not exactly theatrical but not a stuffed one at walmart in a couple years . Not from us. Now, i know we have a video i think were in a lego contest. Lego does mockups of different products. People to vote. I think that the voting on ours isnt so high yet. We can work on that. Have a video here, coming up, of a couple other products that are in development. Yeah. This is our lamborghini project. To making robots that can be productized, this is robot that lets us sort of do of whats boundaries possible. We think of this as, like, our race car. Expensive, kind of finicky, but the highest possible performance. It tove been using develop new techniques and some of the things weve done with have trickled down to more practical designs that ine you know, that are our pipeline for productization. This is both a hardware and a software project, as all of our work is. Connectionimate between hardware and software is whaty an important part of we do. Doing s spot this is spot being tested. People some people think robot. Eing mean to to i promise you the robot has no feelings. Its not angry. Were really showing off that to useful, youto be dont want it to just do exactly what the planned situation is. Able to it to be tolerate various kinds of zurns, what thats disturbances because thats what the real world is like. The robot to have those skills to deal with the unexpected, its a lot easier to get higher level a. I. Communicating with it and telling it what to do to get practical work done. A drone cannot do that . Drones cant do that. I saw a phrase you said once, youre talking about making places notfor designed for automation. What do you mean by that . The mobility of these robots go anywhere a person or animal could go. Theyre not quite there yet, but the vision. Of of uneven terrain. Refinery is aoil place that has really hardtogetto places. A person can do it, climbing stairways, walkways and that. Gs, things like that. Rmal robots cant do so thats where were focused. The robot that we saw that bipad is atlas. Then theres another one called logistics. Can you describe what logistics does . Sure. First of all, spot i call our robot, because we productized it, shipping it already. Handle. Rrow robot is its one thats about a year or away from being a product. Its a logistics robot. Spot is general purpose, designed to be able to do lots of Different Things defined by customers, handle does exactly one thing. It picks up a box. It and it puts it down and it uses Computer Vision to do that, so it can box out of a stack of boxes. It can go into the back of a and unload a truckload of boxes. Its designed for moving boxes in the logistics world. Theres about a trillion boxes shipped every year around the world. Its a huge market. Even though youve heard a lot atut automation, prince, amazon and amazons competitors, thats all mostly in one narrow picking items out putting them cases and putting them into orders. But all around that, both at amazon and all the other retail operations, theres taking boxes off trucks. Sorting them into pallets, going multiskewe skew to pal lets, then putting things back on trucks and shipping them retail. Theres also retail opportunities for this kind of test. Thats our tomorrow activity where were building a special purpose robot just to do that. And, again, it will be about a year, 18 months, ago were doing at largetesting customers, the people youd imagine. Future . Tlas is experimental basically i think robots are cool today but theyre not welly what we imagine, what dream of. I really think robots could be adept or better than people at all the range of can do. E hosting conferences maybe . [laughter] physical things. Now, you resist the notion, robotsw, out there of being scary. I think i read somewhere where who are, its people imh scary, not the robots themselves. You dont like that image . A robot thatild has the shape of a human and if it starts to behave realistically enough, then an audience will look at it and theibute it with all characteristics of a person, which are having an ego, having, wanting power. Anger. Anger. Having to deal with ethical issues like the Previous Panel was talking about. But those are really those are really nowhere in the technology that were developing, nor most robot builders. Its a totally separate thing in my opinion. Out therere people making parody videos of robots. Those must make you nuts . Of them cause us some pain. We work to make our videos so so we used to kick our robots, only for the purpose of showing off how good they were at bouncing. And then we started poking them with a hockey stick for the same thing, to show how they can respond to uncertainty. Took that aspeople us being mean to the robots. That sort of doing thing. But then some of these parodies are showing the robots shooting back at people, kicking them, making it look like its us. To a question from the audience. My own. Tart with its interesting to me to watch spot come up on stage. Theres a driver still. Theres somebody kind of directing it. Where does machine englishing enter learning enter into this Artificial Intelligence the robot can be given a thenby a control center, walk out into the Oil Installation or to the sceutuction site and ects something execute something without a driver . Give two answers. In terms of spot, although today we were driving it because by, it hasple close modes that are more autonomous. Is the root ofy your question. Autonomy is a very tall multilayered cake. And i submit that even people autonomous. Ully they live in the context of the other people who give them have toion or who they interact with. Oftheres plans for a lot things they do. It is true were good at solving problems and we can make up a ourselves. Anyway, our robots have various levels of autonomy. Given an assignment complicatedound a environment and take pictures at specific locations and then send centralized place, where theyre all collated, to be able to do the kind of construction Building Management that i was talking about. When canobably asking, they be told to go to an unmapped place, then they decide, ok, i dont have a map, ill have to map it. Then once they have a map, where readings. Were not working on that. But i think other people in a. I. Could be. Weve designed our platform to be something that can interact with the could have other people interacting with it. To it would be possible build more and more autonomy. We were actually talking to whoomers, also developers, are working on more advanced, higher level a. I. For that. I like to say that you can break the into the intelligence into the athletic part of intelligence and the scholarly part. Part lets me move by body, play a sport where im with respect to another person, avoid answer kls. Its realtime avoid obstacles. Its realtime and local. Planning your is trip to the airport, make sure youre gonna get there in time that kindtraffic, all of stuff. Questions from the awed sequence . We talked a little bit earlier about the electric industry. Many industries are focused on automation, digitalization in future. How should we look at that from your perspective . When we see the acceleration to have ability to move to automation, those kinds of what you see is a future in terms of robotics and ahead. Ckly it will move sm of us, from a workforce aspect, how to deal with that in the future. I think the kind of issues workinge up, and were with national grid, which is probably a similar kind of doingy, where were inspections, where people just cant go because its powered up and too dangerous. Others that probably people could do but theres various tradeoffs. Know, were turning the corner from being a pure company to being a product company. The things right in our face are cost,ility, functionality, you know. How much functionality is there . And i dont think for physical are happeninggs in the blink of an eye like they seem to have happened for the internet. Absolutely making good progress. I think one of the considerations is you need to the water, in order to learn whats involved on your side. You know, as much as we can provide, if we were working together as much as we can provide, you have to have who areeable people ready to receive and that might involve having, you know, an Innovation Group or doing your own research projects, even if you were planning on just accepting our technology, ours and other peoples technologies as a solution. Think thats step one. Other questions . Yes. Jim, washington institute. Of do you address the issue ethical Artificial Intelligence . Ine of the pioneers technology have expressed their concern that what was a very desire on their part to be able to create things like the internet have turned into for ill. And im wondering how you address that if the work that youre doing. You know, i think my first any new technology i dont think robots and a. I. Thanhat much different other technologies, cars, computers,lasers, that they offer opportunities and they offer risks. Have to decide what level of balance you want advantage of the opportunities vs. Dealing with the potential risks. Agree that robotics has applicationthe ill that you sort of mentioned. I think hollywood portrayed them that way. In our minds, if you went to movies when you were a kid, you have you cant help but that as a starting point for a lot of people. But i think its pretty good distortion from what actual, you know, robots that People Like Us make are doing or might be used for. Nowhere nearel is the levels portrayed in by hollywood. So i think, to a large degree, were fighting those images. Time for one more quick question. Right here. Just a quick. I dont mean to be cheeky. Think about robots in the manufacturing process of your robots . Were definitely a ways off from doing that. I think that obviously robots are used to do manufacturing. I have to say, as a side linent, we sort of see a between traditional manufacturing robots, which are aetty much turned into commodity these days, you know, very low cost, very specific function. Different Companies Making the same thing, and robots that have some amount of a. I. And and realtime, you know, adjustment to their environments, like the one going through the door when someone is it. Ling thats like a different world. I think that automation can be used to manufacture robots. Were working at a smaller scale than would make that possible now. A related thing, though, is using contract manufacturers to build our robots. I think first we thought we to findst be able contract manufacturers that would overnight translate our something they were manufacturing, and i think that might be true for iot devices couple of buttons on them and a screen. But for robots that have complex articulated mechanisms, you know, most companies who are manufacturing those things are themselves and it takes thats not a solved problem. Jason, were going to have to leave it there. But we have a spot out front during the break, a little bit later on, that you can help testdrive, right . Yes. Thank you very much, folks. Thank you. [applause] cspans washington journal, news andy day with policy issues that impact you. Morning, tuesday eleanor clift, columnist for the daily beast, discusses and campaign 2020. One America News Networks liz wheeler talks about the news of the day. Watch cspans washington at 7 00 eastern tuesday morning. Join the discussion. Isthis holiday week, book tv on cspan 2 every day with prime night. Atures each tuesday at 8 p. M. Eastern, congressmanpublican Steve Scalise with his book back in the game. Wednesday at 8 p. M. Eastern, a respectiveabout memoirs. Eastern,at 8 30 p. M. The book the cigarette. 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