Boston Dynamics has long been known for creating machines that are both impressive and awe-inspiring. Technically, its humanoid robots are the world leaders in terms of agility and responsiveness, especially the Atlas robot, which was once seen as a harbinger of the arrival of Black Mirror. However, after nearly three decades of efforts in the field of robotics, Boston Dynamics’s commercial exploration did not see its initial dawn until the dog-shaped robot SpotMini in 2019.
In 2005, Boston Dynamics released a 36-inch long, 30-inch wide, 240-pound robot dog called BigDog, which opened the era of robot dogs. BigDog showed outstanding mobility in carrying weight and off-road mountain obstacles, but due to the unsolvable noise problem, BigDog ultimately failed to win a commercial order from the US military, and the product was ultimately not commercialized.
SpotMini was more successful in its exploration of commercialization. Spot’s capabilities are mainly concentrated in perception, navigation, and photography. It can work for 90 minutes on a single charge. In some scenarios, it is equipped with a robotic arm. SpotMini was officially released and sold in 2019, with a sales price of about $75,000 per unit. According to Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, in his speech at the 2023 World Robotics Conference, SpotMini has sold over 1,000 units.
To be honest, this is not a satisfactory sales result. SpotMini’s customers include the New York City Police Department, the New York City Fire Department, the Singapore government, local hospitals in Boston, and the Pompeii ruins in Italy. Of course, the most customers are still in the industrial field. Factory customers bring SpotMini into work environments and tasks that are not suitable for humans to complete inspection work.
The New York Police Department received complaints from users during the use of SpotMini, involving privacy violations and creating a sense of unease. SpotMini was quickly laid off from the New York Police Department. Fortunately, SpotMini quickly found a new job at the New York City Fire Department. Based on the data currently available, the market outlook for robot dogs in the industrial and social public fields is not very optimistic.
The emergence of ChatGPT may be a new opportunity for SpotMini. The biggest practical significance of putting ChatGPT on SpotMini is to turn the complex instructions and data that only technical personnel can handle into natural language that anyone can understand and understand. The lowering of the operating threshold may promote the commercial use of robot dogs in various industries.
