Robert Playter

You know, that's been a theme.

So that's really probably the most important lesson, I think, that I got from Mark.

You know, Mark got some stuff to work, starting from the simple ideas.

So maybe the other, another important idea that has really become a value of the company is try to simplify a thing to the core essence.

And while, you know, Mark was showing videos of animals running across the Savannah or

climbing mountains, what he started with was a pogo stick because he was trying to reduce the problem to something that was manageable and getting the pogo stick to balance.

Had in it the fundamental problems that if we solve those, you could eventually extrapolate to something that galloped like a horse.

And so look for those simplifying principles.

So I'd say in the early days, the thing that made Boston, the researchers at Boston Dynamics special, is that we worked on figuring out what that central principle was, and then building software or machines around that principle.

And that was not easy in the early days.

It took real expertise in understanding the dynamics of motion and feedback control principles.

How to build, with the computers at the time, how to build a feedback control algorithm that was simple enough that it could run in real time at 1,000 hertz and actually get that machine to work.

And that was not something everybody was doing at that time.

Now, the world's changing now, and I think the approaches to controlling robots are going to change, and they're going to become more broadly available.

But at the time, there weren't many groups who could really sort of work at that principled level with both the software and make the hardware work.

And I'll say one other thing about you were sort of talking about what are the special things.

The other thing was, it's good to break stuff.

Use the robots, break them, repair them, fix and repeat, test, fix and repeat.

And that's also a core principle that has become part of the company.

And it lets you be fearless in your work.