Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

> None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago.

Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

I'm not saying one shouldn't be hopeful, but it's also not hard to see why people here are generally more conservative about the near future.

There are actually thousands of Spots out in the world, mostly doing industrial inspections, now.

Humanoid robotics has been picking up pace the past couple of years. The hardware and the software has gotten much better very recently. Progress is not linear. You can see this in Atlas itself.

  >Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

Good point, which is why Boston Dynamics didn't really excite me. It was very cool to see the bot balance itself while being pushed with a hockey stick, but LiDAR-based pathfinding on hydraulic actuators has never truly felt like the future. Balancing and doing backflips is different than walking through a home and being able to perform delicate or visually difficult tasks like loading a dishwasher or caring for your baby in it's crib at night (just kidding, lol)

I'm sure a lot of BD's initial R&D has made Figure able to ramp so quickly and I don't mean to speak negatively of BD at all, but within 3 years, Figure has made it feel like the future is at our doorstep, meanwhile BD hasn't really done that for me in 3 decades. That's very impressive to me.

Building on the shoulders of giants. Not long ago this smaller form factor battery powered electric robot wouldn't have been possible. The necessary tech for the software is only just starting to work. Post-2024 Atlas is also very impressive.

This is quite loosely stated. It's true Boston Dynamics is an old company and that they've had some very cool demos. It's not at all true that they've been showing qualitatively similar things for 20 years.

The oldest video on their YouTube channel is 16 years old, and is of a quadrupedal robot not falling over while inching along tricky surfaces.

> Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots

Boston Dynamics hasn't released any actual products. They seem to be focused on flashy demos of robots dancing instead of end user products.

As a counterpoint, Unitree right now sells humanoids you can actually buy. They're no where near as good, but you can actually use them.

One of the really big things that nobody talks about is the invention of the "mit cheetah actuator" which was invented in (well, the paper was published) in 2017, and commercial copies became freely availble in ~2020 online for about $350-400. Xaiomi and other companies now manufacture improved, updated actuators. They are roughly shaped like a hockey puck 1.5-2.5x upscaled. These are 1) very high torque for their size and weight and 2) offer "springback" similar to human joints. Not very useful for industrial welding machines putting cars together, but for walking robots, it reduces instantaneous strain and literally puts a "spring" in their step. This allowed robots to go from being stepper motor driven (which are huge, heavy), to much more compact, which greatly improves performance, battery life, and they can actually fit in human homes etc etc

They do sell Spot, actually

Also worth noting that Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics in 2021, which I would expect to have been motivated by some sort of plan for productization and mass production.

BD up until very recently only focused on hydraulics were which were extremely loud, expensive, bulky, and expensive to maintain. It was basically impossible to find a use case for such a thing that didn't have to cohabitate in spaces with humans. They also lacked the modeling for it to do much of anything other than walk, and even then recent advances in ML have in only a couple of years massively outperformed their in-house attempts that took 20.

BD was a money-burning machine that suckled off the teat of the miltiary industrial complex, where billions of dollars can be casually lost and there's no accountability and no one notices its gone. Their tech was cool, though, and their engineers did awesome work.

True, though very few (this says "over 1,500"[1]). And from everything I've seen, Spot appears to be a very expensive solution in search of a problem.

They also have Handle, a slow moving robot on wheels with an arm for moving boxes. No idea how many have been sold, but it seems to be even less than Spot.

[1] https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/

Boston Dynamics is very good at the mechanical part of robotics. They only start recently to take a look at integrating more autonomy and long term decision making.