People take pictures and videos of Boston Dynamics Robot Dog named "Spot" during a presentation on the last day of the Web Summit in Lisbon on November 7, 2019. - Europe's largest tech event Web Summit is held at Parque das Nacoes in Lisbon from November 4 to November 7. (Photo by PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP)
LISBON: As videos of robot-like dogs made by Boston Dynamics go viral on the Internet, the humanoids’ uncanny abilities have also sparked worries that they could become a threat to humans.
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Not so, says their creator Marc Raibert in an interview with AFP at the Lisbon Web Summit, claiming that the Spot robots aren’t evil and won’t be turned into weapons.
The first 1,000 Spot models are to be shipped to customers by the summer of 2020.
US engineering and robotics firm Boston Dynamics, founded in 1992, was in 2013 bought by Google, which sold the firm on to Japan’s Softbank in 2017.
How will buyers use Spot?
“So far the kind of people we’re shipping to and working with are developing applications in construction. It’s a popular goal in construction these days to collect data to measure the progress of the construction site,” Raibert said.
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“We’re taking some of those same sensors, and putting them on the robot and having it travel and collect data. There’s a real opportunity to have robots do that on a more routine basis. The robots can localise the sensors much more precisely than people can.
“Another area that we’re working in, we call it gas and oil, but it’s really any facility that needs to be monitored. We’re doing a little bit of work with what we call public safety. Police going to a hazmat hazardous environment situation or bomb threat or just something where there’s an unknown package and rather than have a human going to poke at it they’re using the robots to poke at it.”
Could they harm humans?
Raibert explained that robots “can see the people as obstacles and avoid obstacles. But they’re really not designed to work closely with people. We’re not selling these to people who put them in their homes. -The Star