Robert Playter

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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

And balancing that inertia, that mass up high, is its own unique challenge.

And so we started trying to get Atlas to balance standing on one foot, like on a balance beam, using its arms like this.

And you can do this, I'm sure.

I can do this, right?

Like if you're walking a tightrope, how do you do that balance?

So that's sort of controlling the inertia, controlling the momentum of the robot.

We were starting to figure that out on Atlas.

And so our first concept of Handle, which was a robot that was gonna be on two wheels, so it had the balance, but it was gonna have a big long arm so it could reach a box at the top of a truck.

And it needed yet another counterbalance, a big tail, to help it balance while it was using its arm.

So the reason why this robot sort of looks epic, some people said it looked like an ostrich, or maybe an ostrich moving around, was the wheels, it has legs, so it can extend its legs.

So it's wheels on legs.

We always wanted to build wheels on legs.

It had a tail and it had this arm and they're all moving simultaneously and in coordination to maintain balance because we had figured out the mathematics of doing this momentum control, how to maintain that balance.

And so part of the reason why we built this two-legged robot was we had figured this thing out

We wanted to see it in this kind of machine.

And we thought maybe this kind of machine would be good in a warehouse.

And so we built it.

And it's a beautiful machine.

It moves in a graceful way, like nothing else we've built, but it wasn't the right machine for a logistics application.

We decided it was too slow and couldn't pick boxes fast enough, basically.

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