Boston Dynamics leverages cognitive and athletic intelligence to create human-like robots

October 7, 2020 | AUVSI News

Known for its advanced robots such as the BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, Boston Dynamics leverages a combination of cognitive and athletic intelligence to enable its robots to handle all types of tasks.

According to Dr. Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics, cognitive intelligence has to do with everything going on inside the head that helps you perform tasks like planning out what you’re going do, solving problems, and understanding communications with other people.

Meanwhile, athletic intelligence has to do with how people work with their bodies and perform functions such as walking, running and climbing. Athletic intelligence lets you use your body with efficiencies so that you can go further, and it also allows you to perceive immediate real time surroundings so that you can maneuver around obstacles.

By combining these two types of intelligence, Boston Dynamics has developed robots that can conduct mundane assignments such as carrying boxes—which the company’s Handle robot is designed specifically for—to more complicated feats that a lot of humans can’t do without hurting themselves, such as box jumps and backflips.

The robot most emblematic of this combination of technology at practice is Atlas, the robot that Boston Dynamics is conducting research and development on as it works towards achieving the robots of the company’s dreams. A combination of exotic hardware and reliable software, Atlas is the world’s most dynamic humanoid robot, as it uses dynamic control to do aggressive athletic tasks roughly at a human level performance.

Atlas is equipped with one of the world’s most compact mobile hydraulic systems. Using custom motors, valves, and a compact hydraulic power unit, Atlas delivers high power to any of its 28 hydraulic joints for impressive feats of mobility.

Atlas’ advanced control system enables highly diverse and agile locomotion, while algorithms reason through complex dynamic interactions involving the whole body and environment to plan movements. The robot uses 3D printed parts to give it the strength-to-weight ratio necessary for leaps and somersaults.

Atlas doesn’t quite perform at the level of an Olympic athlete yet, but Dr. Raibert, with a smile, said “we’re hoping to get there.”

Spot helps changes people’s perspective on robots amidst COVID-19

Perhaps the company’s most well-known robot, Spot is a 60-pound, nimble quadruped robot capable of climbing stairs and traversing rough terrain with unprecedented ease.

According to Dr. Raibert, Spot is designed to be a platform, meaning that developers can create custom methods of controlling Spot, program autonomous missions, design payloads to expand the robot’s capabilities, and integrate sensor information into data analysis tools. The robot’s mounting rails, payload ports, and software development kit give customers the tools they need to customize the robot for their application.

As a result of its versatile capabilities, Spot can be used for a variety of missions such as site documentation, thermal inspections, and gas, leak and radiation detections.

One unique application for Spot born out of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is telemedicine, as Boston Dynamics started receiving inquiries from hospitals in early March asking if its robots could help minimize their staff’s exposure to COVID-19. One of the hospitals that the company spoke to shared that, within a week, a sixth of their staff had contracted COVID-19, which led them to looking into using robots to take more of their staff out of range of the novel virus.

The company spent several weeks trying to better understand hospital requirements to develop a mobile robotics solution with Spot, which resulted in a legged robot application that can be deployed to support frontline staff responding to the pandemic in ad-hoc environments such as triage tents and parking lots. By mounting a tablet and other equipment on Spot, the robot allows medical professionals to conduct virtual patient interviews to protect healthcare workers.  

Spot was used at a local Boston facility, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where the medical team used the robot as a mobile telemedicine platform, allowing healthcare providers to remotely triage patients.

Dr. Raibert says that the pandemic has made people more openminded about robots and using them as part of their daily lives.

“The issue of whether people want to engage robots and whether to use them or not has had a different spin put on it since COVID’s been around,” Dr. Raibert explained during a Wednesday morning keynote at Xponential.

“The opportunity to have a non-human go into a space and do a function and not have to expose the other people there, or not have to expose the person who would’ve been in the place of the robot, I think has opened up a lot of people’s minds to how robots can play a positive role in their world.”