Robert Playter

We think...

The future of mobile robots is mobile manipulation.

That's where, in the past 10 years, it was getting mobility to work, getting the legged locomotion to work.

If you ask what's the hard problem in the next 10 years, it's getting a mobile robot to do useful manipulation for you.

And so we wanted Spot to have an arm to experiment with those problems.

And the arm is almost as complex as the robot itself, and it's an attachable payload.

It has several motors and actuators and sensors.

It has a camera in the end of its hand, so you can sort of see something, and the robot will control the motion of its hand to go pick it up autonomously.

So in the same way the robot walks and balances,

managing its own foot placement to stay balanced we want manipulation to be mostly autonomous where the robot you indicate okay go grab that bottle and then the robot will just go do it using the camera in its hand and then sort of closing in on that um the grasp but it's it's a whole nother complex robot on top of a complex legged robot and so and of course we made it

the hand look a little like a head, you know, because, again, we want it to be sort of identifiable.

In the last year, a lot of our sales have been people who already have a robot now buying an arm to add to that robot.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's an option.

We want both.

In the next version of the software that we release, which will be version 3.3, we're gonna offer the ability of, if you have an autonomous mission for the robot, we're gonna include the option that it can go through a door, which means it's gonna have to have an arm and it's gonna have to use that arm to open the door.

And so that'll be an autonomous manipulation task that just, you can program easily with the robot strictly through, you know, we have a tablet interface.

And so on the tablet, you know, you sort of see the view that Spot sees.

You say, there's the door handle.