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

There was an operator who was right there, who was very skilled at Even though the robot was balancing itself and placing its own feet, if the operator didn't do the right thing, it wouldn't go.

But years later, we went back with one of the electric, the precursor to Spot, and we had advanced the controls and everything so much that an amateur, complete amateur, could operate the robot the first time up and down and up and down, whereas it had taken us years to get there in the previous robots.

So Big Dog became LS3, which is the big load carrying one.

It was designed to carry 400, but we had it carrying about 1,000 pounds. Of course you did.

We had one carrying the other one. We had two of them. So we had one carrying the other one. There's a little clip of that. We should put that out somewhere. That's from like 20 years ago. Wow.

So, Big Dog and LS3 had engine power and hydraulic actuation. Then we made a robot that was Electric power, so there's a battery driving a motor, driving a pump, but still hydraulic actuation. Larry sort of asked us, could you make something that weighed 60 pounds that would not be so intimidating if you had it in a house where there were people?

And that was the inspiration behind the spot, pretty much as it exists today. We did a prototype the same size that was the first all-electric thing Non-hydraulic robot.

I mean, it was almost as simple as what I just said. You know, we were having a meeting. He said, yeah, geez, do you think you could make a smaller one that wouldn't be so intimidating, like a big dog, if it was in your house? And I said, yeah, we could do that. And we started and did.

I had been in love with hydraulics and still love hydraulics. It's a great technology. It's too bad that somehow the world out there looks at it like it's old-fashioned or that it's icky. It's true that you do. It is very hard to keep it from having some amount of dripping from time to time. But if you look at the performance, how strong you can get in a lightweight package.

And of course, we did a huge amount of innovation. Most of hydraulic control, that is the valve that controls the flow of oil, had been designed in the 50s for airplanes. It had been made robust enough, safe enough that you could count on it so that humans could fly in airplanes. And very little innovation had happened. You know, that might not be fair to the people who make the valves.

I'm sure that they did innovate. But the basic design had stayed the same. And there was so much more you could do. And so our engineers designed valves, the ones that are in Atlas, for instance, that had new kinds of circuits. They sort of did some of the computing that could get you much more efficient use. They were much smaller and lighter so that the whole robot could be smaller and lighter.

We made a hydraulic power supply that had a bunch of components integrated in this tiny package. It's about this big, the size of a football. It weighs five kilograms and it produces five kilowatts of power. Of course, it has to have a battery operating, but it's got a motor, a pump, filters, heat exchanger to keep it cool, some valves, all in this tiny little package. Hydraulics

you know, could still have a ways to go.

Well, I think having good hardware is part of the story, and people who think you don't need to innovate hardware anymore are wrong, in my opinion. So I think one of the things, certainly in the early years for me, taking a dynamic approach where you think about what's the evolution of the motion of the thing going to be,

in the future and having a prediction of that that's used at the time that you're giving signals to it, as opposed to it all being servoing, which is servoing is sort of backward looking. It says, okay, where am I now? I'm going to try and adjust for that. But you really need to think about what's coming.

It's interesting. I think that the number is only a couple of seconds for a spot. So there's a limited horizon type approach where you're recalculating, assuming what's going to happen in the next second or second and a half. And then you keep iterating. At the next, even though a tenth of a second later, you'll say, okay, let's do that again and see what's happening.

And you're looking at what the obstacles are, where the feet are going to be placed, and how to, you know, you have to coordinate a lot of things if you have obstacles and you're balancing at the same time. And it's that limited horizon type calculation that's doing a lot of that. But if you're doing something like a somersault, you're looking out a lot further, right?

If you want to stick the landing, you have to get the, you know, you have to, at the time of launch, have, you know, momentum and rotation, all those things coordinated so that a landing is within reach.

If you look at the first time we ever made a robot do a somersault, it was in a planar robot. It had a boom. It was restricted to the surface of a sphere. We call that planar. It could move fore and aft. It could go up and down, and it could rotate. The calculation of what you need to do to stick a landing isn't all that complicated.

You have to get time to make the rotation, so how high you jump gives you time. You look at how quickly you can rotate. And so if you get those two right, then when you land, you have the feet in the right place. And you have to get rid of all that rotational and linear momentum. But that's not too hard to figure out.

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