If you’ve seen one Boston Dynamics (a Google-owned robotics company) demonstration video, you’ve seen them all. They are, in a word, nightmarish: six-foot-tall robots jumping through the air; long-necked bots emptying dishwashers; quadrupedal robots pulling Santa’s sleigh. Scary, if impressive, stuff. Today at the TED 2017 conference, Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert announced the company has been trying to make their technology more applicable in the real world, Recode reports. In Boston, the company has been testing Spot, a dog-esque robot, as a package-delivery system.
“We’ve been taking our robot to our employees’ homes to see whether we could get in the various access ways,” Raibert said at the event, Recode also reports. “We’re doing very well — about 70 percent of the way.” That’s 70 percent of the way to having one of these show up on your front porch with that five-pound bag of gummy bears you ordered strapped on its back.
