Robert Playter

So this kind of communication is going to become more and more important.

It wasn't sort of our starting point, but now the robots are really out in the world, and we have about 1,000 of them out with customers right now.

this layer of physical indication, I think is going to become more and more important.

So, Big Dog.

Who's Big Dog?

So, the company started in 1992.

And in probably 2003, I believe, is when we took a contract from DARPA, so basically 10 years, 11 years.

We weren't doing robotics.

We did a little bit of robotics with Sony.

They had their AIBO robot.

We were developing some software for that that kind of got us a little bit involved with robotics again.

Then there was this opportunity to do a DARPA contract where they wanted to build a robot dog.

And we won a contract to build that, and so that was the genesis of Big Dog.

And it was a quadruped, and it was the first time we built a robot that had everything on board, that you could actually take the robot out into the wild and operate it.

So it had an onboard power plant, it had onboard computers, it had hydraulic actuators that needed to be cooled, so we had cooling systems built in.

Everything integrated into the robot.

And that was a pretty rough start, right?

It was 10 years that we were not a robotics company, we were a simulation company, and then we had to build a robot in about a year.

So that was a little bit of a rough transition.

Because Big Dog, I mean, this is this big quadruped, four legs robot.