Robert Playter

So leg length, you know, was now a parameter that we could play with.

Payload was a parameter we could play with.

So we built the LS3, which was an 800 pound robot designed to carry a 400 pound payload.

And we learned the design rules, basically developed the design rules.

How do you scale different robot systems to their terrain, to their walking speed, to their payload?

So when was Spot born?

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.