Boston Dynamics' Spot Demo

all right good afternoon everyone thanks for joining us my name's sarah i'm with federal resources we have tim here from boston dynamics tim's going to do a demonstration of the spot robot for us today boston is a partner of federal resources and i have a few things to run through before we start our demo first you are muted as participants so if you have something to say you have the chat feature on the right hand side that you can type in and all participants can see if you'd like to ask a question we ask that you use the ask a question button at the bottom of your screen which we will read at the end of the presentation and review all questions together and then you'll also see at the bottom of your screen a request a quote button if you'd like more information about what you see today about federal resources or boston dynamics just click on that request to vote request a quote button and we'll get you more information we appreciate that you joined federal resources a solution is a solutions provider to the military our dod federal government and state and local customers we like to bring innovative technology to our customers into the field with our rapid procurement solutions and our partners we look to assist our customers with their missions so with that i'll kick it off to tim and let him start his presentation great thanks sarah i appreciate the the quick introduction um as you mentioned if there's any questions that come up as we go through feel free to to put it in the uh the ask a question button and i'll i'll address those at the end um so really what i wanted to do today was give a real brief history on boston dynamics for for those that may be in attendance that don't have a whole lot of familiarity um after that i'll give a little bit more background on spot our quadruped platform we'll talk about some applications that are common in uh in the industry and then review some of the payloads that assist with those applications and as mentioned at the end we'll we'll go over any questions that there may be so to start a little bit for those that aren't familiar with boston dynamics um a lot of people are through our youtube videos but uh what many people don't know is that we've been around and been in business for over 28 years um the first two decades of our existence we were predominantly working on darpa contracts where we were building small robotic builds you know one off five off maybe 10 off robot builds that solved a very specific use case oftentimes those were a low technology readiness level somewhere in the five or the six range and we were really looking at how quadrupeds and how bipedal motion could be used in in different environments over the last decade our focus has really been on a few things it's been increasing the technology readiness of our robots and also scaling down the size some of our early designs such as ls3 or big dog were you know 800 pound robots designed to carry 400 pounds of load uh through a battlefield but you know our latest generation spot is designed to work in environments where humans more traditionally travel this is showing spot in a home environment not necessarily where where it's used today but uh you know the type of environment that it can go into recently we've really been focused on designing spot for um for mass productions so we have since going on sale in june of this year or of 2020 we now have over 425 robots out in the world and we have a capacity of producing about a thousand units per year right now so that it can really be scaled to whatever operations you you have the main problem that people are are using spot for is is really to collect data and to perform hazardous maybe remote inspections in these types of environments that that traditionally have been built for humans or humans have a very easy time operating in so spot is a you know a safe platform that allows for efficient entry into different antagonistic terrains and it's also you know a very predictable platform that you can rely on regardless of what your mission is you know really as as mentioned the main the main thing that we look at is is the safety aspect it's removing humans removing personnel from these dangerous maybe radioactive explosive environments and allowing a robot to collect data and identify risks from from a distance really we we feel spot is is a a ugv platform that's the right tool for any job it has um 360 degree perception so at any time it's sensing the world around it and i'll show that off here in a little bit but it's sensing the world around it to avoid obstacles to adjust itself to dynamic terrain um you can also perform spots and do things with autonomy so there is a base kind of autonomy stack included in spot so if you want spot to autonomously navigate space that is feasible as well and really what most of our our customers in defense and public safety love about spot is its ability to be customized it's an we have an open api we have a 30 pound payload capacity so that you can either integrate one of our sensors one of our payload partners sensors or any third-party sensor that you see fit for the mission so i'm going to run through a couple of videos here to demonstrate spots um motion and its ability so we we started to work with some early pilot customers in in 2019 and you know mass state police is is one of those that many people are familiar with we use them as uh worked with them as a beta customer to really understand what the unique needs are that that they had and what public safety customers would have um they they comment on a few things they said their traditional robots you know their wheeled and tracked robots had um three main issues one is they could not they could only travel on flat surfaces so they couldn't go upstairs they couldn't go on rocky terrain such as this um and they could not self right the other big thing was they couldn't open doors and so you know we took that feedback and really looked to ensure that spot was able to accomplish all those three tasks so you know you can see hopefully the video is coming across well but you can see spot navigating on various terrains whether it's rocky terrains sand it can go upstairs it can go into to mud small puddles of water and really traverse over any environment that that people do today how it's doing that is is through uh five cameras that are in its body so this is a youtube video that you may have seen of spot and and what's on top here is actually what spot is seeing so it's taking a point cloud of the of the environment around it so that it can properly plan its footsteps plan how it's moving through an environment and successfully get through that environment so if there's an obstacle under 12 inches spot will see that as an obstacle it will automatically adjust its gate to step on or step over that obstacle to to avoid it if it sees an obstacle that's larger than that it will use its obstacle avoidance to to automatically go around it and the key there is the operator is not doing any of those tasks spots doing that all internally and and making those decisions on itself so the operator can keep their mind on on the mission at hand to cover some of the public safety use cases that we're seeing i have a short list here that you know really encompasses what a lot of either federal government dod or public safety customers are looking at spot for you know it comes down to putting putting a robot into a dangerous environment as opposed to to putting a human in that environment it could include isr tasks it could include barricaded suspect response eod or hazmat applications and then a lot of people are investigating how can spot and added autonomy stacks be used to do some natural disaster search and rescue response as well as 3d laser scanning of crime scenes or certain environments so to go into a couple of our our use cases and how people are are using spot today one that i wanted to highlight is the nypd they've been working with spots since uh earlier this summer and predominantly to date they've been fielding it for response to active shooter or or barricaded suspect response um they're sending spot into these environments to to make a a safer and more efficient entry and understand really what's what's going on inside they do not have have the spot arm yet which i'll get into later but you know adding the spot arm will will really allow them to enter doors and and get into more and more locations this is a quote from one of the officers that's been working with spot and you know aside from maybe frank not mentioning a robotic dog or spot specifically i really love this quote um you know really sums up what boston dynamics is after our our mission is to create robots that positively impact society and it really doesn't get much better for us than to see our robots use to help save lives and and keep people out of harm's way this video here is a um an isr exercise that was uh conducted by one of our our solution partners that partner focuses on gesture control for spot so in this case um that risk worn device that was on the the person uh is controlling spot and it's also controlling this team of drones so um this is showing how spot could be used in in a an isr uh or a tactical situation they've also integrated um spot with attack plug-in so it uh you know can work with atac and they've they've done a number of custom payload developments um to allow for this drone spot teaming to be successful um you know this their gesture control unit allows these tactical units to keep their eyes and hands on the mission at hand and not necessarily need our out of the box controller so so this is a good example of of how you know some teams are using spot um to talk about some of the payloads that boston dynamics offers and and are also available on the market um one of our primary payloads that that is used by public safety is is what's called our spot cam plus ir so spot comes with five stereo cameras as i mentioned that's what it's using for obstacle avoidance um but it doesn't give you very good situational situational awareness so the spot cam is a 360 degree color camera that also has a pan tilt mechanism that has a 30x optical zoom rgb camera and a uh a fleer tattoo thermal camera on it so that you can stream 360 degree imagery you can pan or tilt or zoom in on something of of interest and you can also get thermal data back all through our tablet uh controller so that's a very common payload that that a lot of our customers are using in the space another common payload is the flir c360 so this was initially developed for drones we've worked with flear to to equip this on the back of spot so that you can send spot into an area get multi gas sensing um i think it has eight sensor or eight uh gases that it can sense um so depending on the environment you go into you can get a gas reading and all that stream directly over the tablet and through the spot application on that control device i mentioned at the beginning that kind of one of the biggest benefits that our customers are seeing is with spod is that you're not just limited to the payloads that that we are creating um you know we have an open api we have 30 pounds of payload capacity so it allows you to add any third-party payload that you may already have in use um we have a growing ecosystem of of payload partners that are developing plug-and-play integrations for spot and and also integrating those into our controller application so some of those include leica who makes you know 3d laser scanning devices such as the blk2go or the blk360 ferro who also makes 3d laser scanning hardware and and flair is another uh close partner of ours we're also working with uh you know some of our partners are working on various um seaburn integrations as well so um you know things like smith dragger anton parr this this video here is showing a pendar x10 spectrometer so this is a device that's used for chemical id or narcotics id and this is just a video of that unit mounted on spot in our lab to to detect uh chemical substances the other the other thing that you know spot is flexible in is communications so you know not only can you add any payload we've also designed spot to be cons agnostic so out of the box it comes with wi-fi technology and that's how you communicate between the controller and spot but we've had customers deploy with a variety of communication strategies so spot's been deployed with persistent system mpu-5s with reagent with silvis radios we've also seen spot used on the firstnet network as well as other lte networks and then have partners that have developed tech plugins for spot um so that you can not only communicate with spot you can communicate with you know other other team members that may be in the troop um so we felt this this approach to coms was was really important um as we were talking to early customers everyone kind of has different com strategy and it's important to be flexible so that you can put you know whatever con ops or whatever communication solution fits your con ops um we do have also some partners that you know tie in command vehicles so you know you could have an extended mesh network um a command vehicle and and then see inside and kind of see what spot is doing on those on those monitors so the uh the next payload that i'll mention is the uh the spot arm so you know really spots core uses to is to be used as a mobile sensor uh platform but an important piece of that is to start to you know interact with things that may be in the environment and and we do that through the spot arm so the the arm is designed to you know allow you to open doors allow you to pick objects uh maybe push or drag objects and really the key what we've focused on is is to make the arm very easy to use i often say that my five-year-old daughter and my 75 year old father can have picked up the spot controller and they've been controlling spot within probably minutes so i mean it's it's very easy to use all you're doing is pressing forward on the joystick and spots doing everything else the arm is a little more complex i wouldn't necessarily say my five-year-old has has mastered it yet but we try and make it as easy as possible so in this video you see spot opening a door what the user is doing is on the tablet they're identifying where the door handle is they're identifying the direction that the hinges are and then spot will go through a everything else autonomously so all that other action was performed by spot in this case the user pressed the drill on the tablet interface and again spot is doing everything else fully autonomously so that so that the user doesn't have to be an expert controller it does take a little bit of time but it's i think far easier based off the feedback we've heard from public safety customers than some of the traditional uh track and wheeled robot arms that they're they're currently using so we're really excited for uh for various people to to try out the arm which was just um officially released for sale earlier this month in february so from here i'll uh i'll answer any any questions that uh that you may have um we we are looking at doing a uh demo um with federal resources at their headquarters i think it's going to be the week of march uh 22nd and and so you're if you want more information on that i think you can hit the request a quote and the federal resources team will make sure to get you the dates and details for that uh when it's available yeah absolutely thank you tim we have quite a few questions that we'll roll through but as you mentioned uh any questions that you have post this demonstration you can contact your account rep if you'd like more information on the demo that we're going to do in march they will have that information or you can click request quote which will go to the marketing team and we'll communicate with the proper account room so if we start the questions we have some here that's great the first is with the dod starting to look deeper into the use of laws what is boston's position on integration with laws onto the spot platform um with with laws did you say laws yeah l-a-w-s um i'm not too familiar with the the laws platform so i'd i'd probably have to to get back to you on this question came from our chief strategy officer mike russell so i could invite him on stage with us and he could elaborate on it i don't know he might decline but i'll try to invite him on stage let's see all right we'll move on to the next one if mike comes on stage then we'll we'll answer that question uh the next is is spot deconable and intrinsically safe um no so spot is spot is ip54 um so it is it can be washed down and you can uh you can decon it so we have we do have users that are putting spot into nuclear environments um you know you can apply water by soap to to get off contamination but it is not intrinsically safe or uh or um a tech certified thank you okay mike you caught me in lunch sarah hey now that laws is lethal autonomous weapon system um and you know i know it's a it's kind of a somewhat of a controversial topic you know a lot of nations are against it but the us i won't say has been super favorable you know kind of it's definitely kind of rides the party lines from time you know people see the benefits of autonomous weapon systems as being a little bit safer from friendly fire or casualties in the field um but they also see it as kind of being a scary next step so just want to hear maybe boston's kind of take or you know maybe you guys don't have a take on it so to say but uh on where your thoughts are on it no we we definitely have a take on it so we've had these discussions with with various people throughout the dod and you know our our state is pretty firm um we do not want spot to be used to harm or intimidate people so as far as weaponizing spot that's against the terms of use of spot you know we we really as i said our mission is to um you know really enhance enhance the lives of society overall and we feel that that um weaponizing crosses that line uh but but it can be used for you know a variety of use cases um and i think a lot of the dod groups would would agree that you know the isr and the different hazmat applications spots being used for um can really help them yeah now we've seen a big push on the seaburn space for them to get some kind of isr look and you know with the use of a uav they've always had issues with trying to collect a sample and blowing everything around with kind of the backwash from a uav but you know launching a uav so you get that isr feed but then being able to run a sensor into a cloud or an explosive where explosion was you know is a really good combination that could probably fit the bill for a lot of what the jpo is looking at so appreciate that color yeah hey sarah take me off screen thanks tim thanks for thanks for answering i appreciate it um okay perfect next question oh well i'll save that one for the end uh what's the right and rain spot and is there any way to mount disruption tools to him yeah so spots spots run time is um is 90 minutes um it it's you know walks at around 1.5 or 1.6 meters per second so you know in theory out of a battery use if you're walking you can get around 7.5 kilometers and what about disruption to him yeah i mean so our our terms of uses is focused you know really specifically on on not harming or intimidating humans um and and not weaponizing the robot so i can i can talk uh further about you know how you know how that fits uh with you guys offline okay perfect um how well does doing wet weather yeah a great question ip54 rated so it can you know withstand rain it can withstand um a wash down it doesn't high pressure wash down is is going to start to potentially seep into it so we don't recommend high pressure wash down um as far as puddles go you know spot water is an interesting thing spot seed puddles a lot of times as the ground and so you may see a little bit of different behavior with spot when it's walking through your puddle but it can it can take water or submerging up to its first elbow joint um without a problem to the elbow joint ah gosh that's a great question probably about six you know i wouldn't go in puddles more than six inches okay um who is spots and why is scott different or superior yeah that's a great question so you know spot spot has i think a lot of competitors of what people are traditionally using um as a mobile data collection tool you know people have traditionally used wheeled and tracked robots um and you know as dating back to our initial met with the mass state police i think the biggest differentiator there is is on the fact that it can go upstairs uh very easily that it can go on more difficult terrains and then the arm i think is really a game changer in bringing simplicity of control to to an arm so that's uh something that that i think shines above the rest um you know others in various inspection applications say that that drones are a competitor spot and you know in some cases those those use cases will overlap the benefits of of spot um are a longer battery life a higher payload capacity and and the ability to operate indoors um but drones also i think have their purpose in in various missions um lastly if you look at the quadruped technology i think there are some some new quadrupeds that are coming to the market um you know boston dynamic strength really lies in the fact that we've been doing this for for 28 years um we are also mass producing these i think we're the only quadruped manufacturer out there that has you know over a hundred we have 425 out in the field today and i i think we can hold that title as the only one that's mass producing these and that also has the service and support network set up to to really fulfill um you know quadruped awesome thank you tim does it have a communicate through the robot sorry i i miss does it have what to communicate through the robot speaker so the spot cam or the spot cam plus ir does have a a two-way audio um connection so that you can communicate with the controller um bought natively without that payload thing not great um your own platform does your payload support are any ndaa approved so you know the the drone development work that i showed was really a custom integration um designed by one of our solution partners so um i think i'm describing their attributes lately all right i think i'm gonna turn my speaker off and why are you in here just chit chat with me don't give me any technology look um i i'm not positive i think that was a shield iq uh drone system that was being used in that video i showed but you know it would depend on it would be a custom integration by uh by a solution partner great thank you this one i think that you covered i'll mention it again just because i think it is important um but the question was whether you could provide an overview of the programming and architecture but you said that it had an open api and so that you can look for other technologies that can be integrated into the operating system yeah so uh so it's a python based api is is the software language that uh that we use for the api um the the spot app is a an android based application um so so you know you can integrate a variety of different payloads through that python-based api great and joe asked with whom they would discuss new payload options joe what i would do is get in contact with your account rep at federal resources or click on request a quote and we'll directly communicate through our rep and tim and we can talk about specific payload options okay next question i think we just have a couple more can it navigate via gps waypoints so um natively spot doesn't or out of the box spot doesn't have a a gps built in as mentioned we do have partners that have that have created an atac plug-in so that could be used to do gps-based waypoint creation um and you could also integrate your own gps device to do that but out of the box spot doesn't uh navigate via gps coordinates very good i think our last question is uh when you expect spot to take over the world um you know that's that's a great story it's you know i think entertainment hollywood has created this perception that that robots are going to take over the world um we hope that there's a lot of robots in the world but you know we we see them as only helping humans and helping society um i i don't think you know the robots we build i wouldn't say are are smart enough to to take over and and we just see them for the next several decades being a tremendous help to our society and and saving lives and helping people that's fantastic another question actually just popped up um can you expand on how you protect payloads including camera and robot arm from falls or rollovers uh yeah roll cages is is highly recommended with any payload design because you know spot is a quadruped it will fall over um and uh and so having a roll cage all our payloads come with roll cages most of our third-party partners do the same um but any any payload that you'd add we'd highly highly would suggest a roll cage very good those are all the questions that we had i thought you did a great job presenting spot to our attendees today oh there's another one it's the same question it says let me rephrase we have payloads that might be of interest to your firm should i reach out to tim joe yes through federal resources we can get you in contact with kim okay so that's good so again just to reiterate we appreciate tim and boston dynamics joining us all today any more information the recording will be sent after the presentation to all attendees you can share with your coworkers or contact your account rep for more information we really appreciate all of your time thanks everyone thank you

Channel: Federal Resources

Views: 275

Rating: 4.1999998 out of 5

Keywords: webinar, Spot, Boston Dynamics

Id: GOYzt99Fqoc

Length: 32min 38sec (1958 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021