Robert Playter

speaker

1,075 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2023 last heard Apr 2023

Robert Playter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · 28 Apr 2023 podcast

Around 2012 or so.

So again, almost 10 years into sort of a run with DARPA where we built a bunch of different quadrupeds, we had sort of a different thread where we started building humanoids, we saw that probably an end was coming where the government was gonna kind of back off from a lot of robotics investment.

And in order to maintain progress,

we just deduced that, well, we probably need to sell ourselves to somebody who wants to continue to invest in this area, and that was Google.

And so at Google, we would meet regularly with Larry Page, and Larry just started asking us, you know, well, what's your product gonna be?

And, you know, the logical thing, the thing that we had the most history with that we wanted to continue developing was a quadruped.

But we knew it needed to be smaller.

We knew it couldn't have a gas engine.

We thought it probably couldn't be hydraulically actuated.

So that began the process of exploring if we could migrate to a smaller electrically actuated robot.

And that was really the genesis of SPOT.

Larry always liked the toothbrush test.

He wanted products that you used every day.

What they really wanted was a consumer-level product, something that would work in your house.

We didn't think that was the right next thing to do because to be a consumer-level product, cost is gonna be very important.

Probably needed to cost a few thousand dollars.

And we were building these machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million dollars to build.

Of course, we were only building two, but...

but we didn't see how to get all the way to this consumer level product.

In a short amount of time.

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