How Boston Dynamics' Spot Robot Works!

hey guys you're about to watch another spot video but before he did I needed to make a couple of announcements to make some things clear the reason you see us all hanging out with each other unabashedly is specifically because we'd shot this before the shelter-in-place order went down actually I think a couple of weeks before which is why we're so cavalier about personal space but second and most importantly I wanted to talk about safety issues regarding the handling of spot the fact is he is a magnificent remarkable piece of engineering and he's also an industrial robot and the care that should be taken around him is the care you would take around any industrial robot which means that it could hurt you if you do things wrong for instance spot runs on 12 motors three in each shoulder to the control the XY of the shoulder and one that controls the elbow and those motors are all super powerful if you've got your finger between the motor and a place that wanted to go your fingers gonna lose in that equation and all around the perimeter of his body is nothing but pinch points in fact he has these handy straps up here on the shoulders which are the safe places to be able to grab spot however best practice is to always turn off spots motors before you get anywhere near him all this is my way of saying that you will see me exhibit some less-than-ideal practices with spot in this video and that is because of the level of comfort I've achieved after three or four months of working with him I just wanted you to know that up front all right enjoy the video hey Adam here from Testim with another spot video now we've been giving him skills and tasks so far and we have great plans for a whole host of new skills and tasks in the future but we thought this video was a good time to rewind a little bit and go back and talk about some of the basic rudiments of how spot operates you guys have been submitting some great questions about how we steer him how he died him exactly what his abilities are and how autonomous he can be so get ready it's time for a little bit of spot 101 my main interface with spot is via this android-based tablet computer the handle is my own design for ease of utilizing it and the first thing that happens when you power him up is he creates his own wireless network and I connect to it using this handset that's not the only way he can operate it's just the way he's delivered out of the box so spot right now is upside down which means that's why the camera shot of me is upside down but I'm gonna put him into self-right mode and it's a set of protocols that he uses to stand up there he is well good morning how are you damn he's cute isn't he so spot right now is up and running and he is set to all of his medium settings medium gate medium height medium speed and these are all fabulous for controlling him in a moderated and balanced fashion you can change his step height from normal to very tiptoe II or super high all of those actually make him slightly less coordinated but again this is all just out of the box he is basically a route platform at this point and I can control how he walks I can control in a couple of different ways I can control him with joysticks and with the joysticks I have two different controls the left control can go forward and back left and right and the right hand control is simply spin clockwise and counter clockwise so that is one of the main ways however I want to be clear that even though I'm directly controlling him from these joysticks he's still making a bunch of decisions on his own for instance if I attempted to run him into that table he would not run into the table watch him avoid it I am mashing the joystick forward and he is not bound banging into any obstacles despite my attempts to get him to so here I'm steering him right into the table and he is moving his way around look at that did you see that he lifted his foot around the drainpipe again realized that even though I'm controlling him what's going on inside of him is way more complex than just an RC car following the direction you're pointing he's making all sorts of assessments about his surroundings so as I move him over the pallet if I move slowly he goes one foot at a time and he is seeing the pallet understand that not only does he see the pallet and his camera he also recognizes that it's a 3d object he actually can see where his feet are gonna land on it and he can adjust his gait based on what his anticipation of where those footfalls are gonna land now watch we try and steer him into the wall and he's not gonna hit it he's just gonna stop he's gonna keep on trying to find a way through the wall until he sees one and since he's not gonna see one I'll just steer him back out again now we can do the same thing with stairs I steer him into stairs and he only has the mode of knowing that he's facing stairs and then he makes all the decisions about how to get up all right now I can change several parameters like I said he comes out of the box running on medium everything here's a step height being normal here's a step height being high and here's his step light step height being low I like this one because it looks like he's tiptoeing also there's actually a really interesting thing about his gait because all humans as you know or you might not know but we walk by falling right there's this pendulum effect and there's a little bit of a fall and his gait actually includes that unless you move him very slowly and then he moves so that he's always over his center of gravity so if I push very slowly you'll see that instead of two legs at a time he'll start to move one leg at a time here we go that's it and this in this way because he's moving so slowly he doesn't get any advantage from the pendulum effect of his swinging his legs back and forth and thus he moves more carefully to keep his balance also I'm running on medium speed so let's see if I increase his speed this is his fastest speed everyone was wondering here it is it's not that fast but it's about a normal human walk yeah whoa sorry about that buddy oh but these aren't all the tricks up his sleeves his sleeves he doesn't even have sleeves he can do a little bit of dressage nope and while he's doing this he can do everything you could normally do with them a little bit of dance this is the gift there it is here's the boomerang oh yeah one foot there we go okay stop good boy these are some of the basic rudimentary skills spot has been shipped with but again don't think of him as a robot think of him as the very base level of a robotic platform so up till now I've been scaring him using the joysticks forward reverse left-right but I actually don't even have to use that I could use the video interface of what spot's sees in order to direct him so I'm looking at his front cameras right now I'm gonna point to a spot on the ground now he's gonna make his way there and as long as I keep pressing spots on the ground spot figures out a way he wants to go get where I'm telling him to go and again if I tried to steer him into something he is actually going to avoid it here let's try and steer him over here into the wall there he is stopping now if I want to get him out of this Jam the thing is I can actually look at multiple cameras from him I can look out his left side his right side or his backside and for his backside that's what I'm gonna do because I can't see him right now if you look up I can't see him from here but let me push a spot here and have him back in there is why hey buddy so let's steer him around back towards us and here you can see us and spot is walking right back towards us and again I don't have to tell him how to navigate past this palette that he's walking into I just have to point to the other side of it and he figures out a way to get past it so the joysticks here are really the first out-of-the-box control mechanism but they're also probably the first to go totally by the wayside if spot is to actually have any real utility pointing to spots on the ground as a sort of second level but there's a much deeper level of autonomy that spot can have and that's what we're gonna look at next one of the very first questions people ask me about him is is he like mapping the space that he's in and the answer that is absolutely so the Boston Dynamics team has actually built a system for spot to self orientate and that is using these fiducials it looks like a QR code that's because that's exactly what it is we print these out on eight-and-a-half by 11 sheets of paper and because it's printed in this exact size on a hard piece of board spot when he sees it in his camera notes what it is and can tell exactly his orientation to and distance from it because he knows what size it should be so we're gonna put a few of these around and give spot an autonomous mission so I have placed these fiducials a dozen of them around the environment and we're going to record spot walking through that environment and then play it back and that will allow him to walk a path that we have predetermined how this applies to the real world a civ spot had to deliver something from one part of a factory floor to another or do something in terms of monitoring where I had to walk the same path every day you'd put these fiducials around the space and they would be how he would navigate that space I haven't actually tried it on this scale before so let's go so I've just recorded a mission for him going downstairs walking a circle coming back upstairs and he is going to replay that mission but it's not like he recorded exactly how I told him to walk that way he's gonna make his own decisions about his gait and his cadence as we go so let's see how he does okay here we go play oh right there he's walking backwards down the stairs it's actually the more stable way for him to walk down stairs and I can talk about that in a second but he just made his own call I walked him front way and he's like now it's much easier for me to go backwards and that's how I'm gonna go here he comes back upstairs understand that when he is approaching stairs he can see them topographically and each stair presents him a nice fat picture to put his foot on so walking up stairs is relatively straightforward for him now if I turn him around and you think about what he can see from this point of view come here understand now that he's looking down and the sight picture of where his foot can land here is much narrower because he doesn't have the full step this leg right here inhibits his leg from hitting here so he has a much narrower picture of each stair to walk down which is why he prefers to walk down stairs backwards so I'm gonna turn him around and you'll see that backwards he has again a nice fat sight picture for each stair and thus it's a lot more stable for him to walk down stairs backwards however like just understanding that he can see the stairs and choose where to put his feet is freaking mind-blowing to me it's absolute magic okay now that we've run him on a mission going up and down the stairs I think I want to try a more specific mission form okay this is a more real-world scenario I've set up a bunch of fiducials and a kind of a court here I'm gonna have spot walk up and down this court and you'll see why in a little bit record new mission alright spot you're gonna go forward and you're gonna turn around and you're gonna walk back the stream same way and then you're gonna turn around and you're gonna walk back the same way now I'm gonna play the mission now it's time to talk about why I wanted to run him on this mission this here is a bucket of bolts and nails and stuff that you don't want in your parking lot this here is a magnetic pickup I'm gonna rig a little duct tape tails so that spot can drag this behind him and clean up this parking lot yeah okay what kind of parking lot are you guys running around here look at all these nails everywhere this is a horror show Wow ah if only there was somebody who could clean it all up proof of concept yes he did not like the load on his back legs because I didn't think through this rig too carefully but you get my point you see the point he picked up the nails so that is the basic set of rudimentary orientation and navigation skills spot comes out of the box with and while it may seem pretty baseline it's also insanely robust but it is the bottom level there's an API there are comport there's all sorts of extra channels of proprioception and self orientation that can be added and will be added by different developers under different circumstances now we know a lot of you been asking how long does this battery run we've been filming solid for about an hour and he's at about 30% the working time is 90 minutes on a single battery charge and his payload how much can he lift just a shade over 30 pounds all right well that's it spotting are gonna go now please leave your comments and questions below we will try and answer them we'll have some new skills for spot next month I think you're gonna really appreciate them but now he's been very good for a long time I think it's time to take him out for food you

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,866,578

Rating: 4.9087863 out of 5

Keywords: tested, testedcom, adam savage, boston dynamics, legged locomotion, robot dog, boston dynamics spot, spot mini, boston dynamics robot, walking robot, black mirror, boston dynamics dog, machine learning projects, adam savage's tested, spotmini dance, spotmini robot, rough-terrain vehicle, robot dog boston dynamics, black mirror metalhead dog, adam savage robot dog, adam savage boston dynamics, adam savage tested, adam savage mythbusters, spot robot, dancing robots

Id: R-PdPtqw78k

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/uncivil--engineer]

Nice video, I love Adam Savage's spot videos.

[u/AstroAlmost]

having watched the newest adaptation of War of the Worlds, spot is all the more unsettling. yet, somehow i want one even more.

[u/twoshovels]

Yea I want one as well. These are cool .

[u/GabelHoppa]

Adam's Spot has triforces imprinted on it's legs