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Boston Dynamics Will Now Sell Any US Business its Own Spot Robot for $74,500

posted by martyb on Wednesday June 17 2020, @01:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the can-you-spot-the-robot? dept.

DannyB writes:

Boston Dynamics will now sell any business its own Spot robot for $74,500:

Robotmaker Boston Dynamics has finally put its four-legged robot Spot on general sale. After years of development, the company began leasing the machine to businesses last year, and, as of today, is now letting any US firm buy their very own Spot for $74,500.

It's a hefty price tag, equal to the base price for a luxury Tesla Model S. But Boston Dynamics says, for that money, you're getting the most advanced mobile robot in the world, able to go pretty much anywhere a human can (as long as there are no ladders involved).

Although Spot is certainly nimble, its workload is mostly limited right now to surveying and data collection. Trial deployments have seen Spot create 3D maps of construction sites and hunt for machine faults in offshore oil rigs. Less routine tests include helping hospitals triage COVID-19 patients and, somewhat controversially, working with a police bomb squad.

[...] "We mostly sell the robot to industrial and commercial customers who have a sensor they want to take somewhere they don't want a person to go," Boston Dynamics' lead robotics engineer, Zack Jackowski, told The Verge last week.

[...] One feature that Boston Dynamics is currently working on is remote teleoperation. A demo version of this feature will be available to potential Spot customers who will be able to take a unit for a test drive in a robot assault course in the company's headquarters.

[...] Although Spot is something of a celebrity in the robot world, it's still very much a limited product. The company has leased around 150 units to customers to date, and it's going to miss its target of producing 1,000 Spot robots this year due to the impact of the coronavirus. (It'll hit the target Q1 2021, says Perry.) Customers will also be limited to buying two robots at a time, and larger orders will need to be discussed with Boston Dynamics

It's nice to know that robots have good dance moves to entertain humans working remotely from home.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:56PM (#1009146)

    > If they loaded a coffee-machine on it and had it walk around the office like a robo-butler that would really be something.

    Except it can probably program better than you so you should probably work on your coffee-serving skills and stop wasting the robot's time..