Marc Raibert

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243 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2024 last heard Feb 2024

Marc Raibert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · 16 Feb 2024 podcast

So we built this thing and took it to a trade show, a surgical trade show. And the surgeons were practically lined up. Well, we kept the score and we posted their scores like on a video game. And those guys are so competitive that they really, really love doing it. And they would come around and they see someone's score was higher there. So they would come back.

But we figured out shortly after that we thought surgeons were going to pay us to get trained on these things. And the surgeons thought we should pay them in order to, so they could teach us about the thing. And there was no money from the surgeons. And we looked at it and thought, well, maybe we could sell it to hospitals that would teach, train their surgeons.

And then we said, well, we're this, at the time we were probably a 12-person company or maybe 15 people, I don't remember. There's no way we could go after a marketing activity. You know, the company was all bootstrapped in those years. We never had investors until Google bought us, which was after 20 years. So we didn't have any resources to go after hospitals.

So at one day, Rob and I were looking at that and we said, we'd built another simulator for knee arthroscopy. And we said, this isn't going to work. And we killed it. And we moved on, and that was really a milestone in the company because we sort of understood who we were and what would work and what wouldn't, even though technically it was really a fascinating thing.

It just always felt right once we did it, you know?

Well, there was the AIBO Runner, but it wasn't even a whole robot. It was just legs that we, we took off the legs on AIBOs and attached the legs we'd made. We got that working and showed it to the Sony people. We worked pretty closely with Sony in those years. One of the interesting things is that it was before the internet and Zoom and anything like that.

So we had six ISDN lines installed, and we would have a telecon every week that worked at very low frame rates, something like 10 hertz. You know, English across the boundary with Japan was a challenge, trying to understand what each of us was saying and have meetings every week. for several years doing that. And it was a pleasure working with them. They were really supporters.

They seemed to like us and what we were doing. That was the real transition from us being a simulation company into being a robotics company again.

Yeah, no, four legs, yeah.

Mostly we learned that something that small doesn't look very exciting when it's running. It's like it's scampering. And you had to watch a slow-mo for it to look like it was interesting. If you watch it fast, it was just like a... That's funny. One of my things was to show stuff in video, even from the very early days of the hopping machines.

And so I was always focused on how is this going to look through the viewfinder. And running AIBO didn't look so cool through the viewfinder.

I mean, you got to say that big dog was, you know, sort of put us on the map and got our heads really pulled together. We scaled up the company. Big dog was the result of, uh, Alan Rudolph at DARPA, uh, starting a biodynotics program and he put out a, you know, a request for proposals and, uh, I think there were 42 proposals written and three got funded. One was Big Dog.

One was a climbing robot, Rise. That put things in motion. We hired Martin Buehler. He was a professor in Montreal at McGill. He was incredibly important for getting Big Dog started. Out of the lab and into the mud, which is a key step to really be willing to go out there and build it, break it, fix it, which is sort of one of our mottos at the company.

Well, it's the first thing that worked. So let's see, if we go back to the leg lab, we built a quadruped that could do many of the things that Big Dog did, but it had a hydraulic pump sitting in the room with hoses connected to the robot. Mm-hmm. It had a VAX computer in the next room. It needed its own room because it was this giant thing with air conditioning.

And it had this very complicated bus connected to the robot. And the robot itself just had the actuators. It had gyroscopes for sensing and some other sensors. But all the power and computing was off-board. Big Dog had all that stuff integrated on the platform. It had a gasoline engine for power, which was a very complicated thing to undertake.

It had to convert the rotation of the engine into hydraulic power, which is how we actuated

uh it so there was a lot of learning just on the uh you know building the physical robot and the system integration for that and then there was the controls uh of it so for big dog you brought it all together onto one platform right and then so you could you could take it out in the woods yeah and you did we did we spent a lot of time down at the uh marine corps base in quantico where there was a trail

called the guadalcanal trail and our uh milestone that darpa had specified was that we could go on this one particular trail that involved you know a lot of challenge and we spent a lot of time our team spent a lot of time down there those were fun days hiking with the robot what did you learn about like what it takes to balance a robot like that on a trail

Yeah. As challenging as the woods were, working inside of a home or in an office is really harder. Because when you're in the woods, you can actually take any path up the hill. All you have to do is avoid the obstacles. There's no such thing as damaging the woods, at least to first order. Whereas if you're in a house, you can't leave scuff marks. You can't bang into the walls.

The robots aren't very comfortable bumping into the walls, especially in the early days. So I think those were actually bigger challenges once we faced them. It was mostly getting the systems to work well enough together, the hardware systems to work, and the controls. In those days, we did have a human operator who did all the visual perception going up the Guadalcanal Trail.

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