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  • (Laughter)

  • (Laughter)

  • That's SpotMini.

  • He'll be back in a little while.

  • I --

  • (Applause)

  • I love building robots.

  • And my long-term goal is to build robots

  • that can do what people and animals do.

  • And there's three things in particular

  • that we're interested in.

  • One is balance and dynamic mobility,

  • the second one is mobile manipulation,

  • and the third one is mobile perception.

  • So, dynamic mobility and balance --

  • I'm going to do a demo for you.

  • I'm standing here, balancing.

  • I can see you're not very impressed. OK, how about now?

  • (Laughter)

  • How about now?

  • (Applause)

  • Those simple capabilities mean that people can go almost anywhere on earth,

  • on any kind of terrain.

  • We want to capture that for robots.

  • What about manipulation?

  • I'm holding this clicker in my hand;

  • I'm not even looking at it,

  • and I can manipulate it without any problem.

  • But even more important,

  • I can move my body while I hold the manipulator, the clicker,

  • and stabilize and coordinate my body,

  • and I can even walk around.

  • And that means I can move around in the world

  • and expand the range of my arms and my hands

  • and really be able to handle almost anything.

  • So that's mobile manipulation.

  • And all of you can do this.

  • Third is perception.

  • I'm looking at a room with over 1,000 people in it,

  • and my amazing visual system can see every one of you --

  • you're all stable in space,

  • even when I move my head,

  • even when I move around.

  • That kind of mobile perception is really important for robots

  • that are going to move and act

  • out in the world.

  • I'm going to give you a little status report

  • on where we are in developing robots toward these ends.

  • The first three robots are all dynamically stabilized robots.

  • This one goes back a little over 10 years ago --

  • "BigDog."

  • It's got a gyroscope that helps stabilize it.

  • It's got sensors and a control computer.

  • Here's a Cheetah robot that's running with a galloping gait,

  • where it recycles its energy,

  • it bounces on the ground,

  • and it's computing all the time

  • in order to keep itself stabilized and propelled.

  • And here's a bigger robot

  • that's got such good locomotion using its legs,

  • that it can go in deep snow.

  • This is about 10 inches deep,

  • and it doesn't really have any trouble.

  • This is Spot, a new generation of robot --

  • just slightly older than the one that came out onstage.

  • And we've been asking the question --

  • you've all heard about drone delivery:

  • Can we deliver packages to your houses with drones?

  • Well, what about plain old legged-robot delivery?

  • (Laughter)

  • So we've been taking our robot to our employees' homes

  • to see whether we could get in --

  • (Laughter)

  • the various access ways.

  • And believe me, in the Boston area,

  • there's every manner of stairway twists and turns.

  • So it's a real challenge.

  • But we're doing very well, about 70 percent of the way.

  • And here's mobile manipulation,

  • where we've put an arm on the robot,

  • and it's finding its way through the door.

  • Now, one of the important things about making autonomous robots

  • is to make them not do just exactly what you say,

  • but make them deal with the uncertainty of what happens in the real world.

  • So we have Steve there, one of the engineers,

  • giving the robot a hard time.

  • (Laughter)

  • And the fact that the programming still tolerates all that disturbance --

  • it does what it's supposed to.

  • Here's another example, where Eric is tugging on the robot

  • as it goes up the stairs.

  • And believe me,

  • getting it to do what it's supposed to do in those circumstances

  • is a real challenge,

  • but the result is something that's going to generalize

  • and make robots much more autonomous than they would be otherwise.

  • This is Atlas, a humanoid robot.

  • It's a third-generation humanoid that we've been building.

  • I'll tell you a little bit about the hardware design later.

  • And we've been saying:

  • How close to human levels of performance and speed could we get

  • in an ordinary task,

  • like moving boxes around on a conveyor?

  • We're getting up to about two-thirds of the speed that a human operates

  • on average.

  • And this robot is using both hands, it's using its body,

  • it's stepping,

  • so it's really an example of dynamic stability,

  • mobile manipulation

  • and mobile perception.

  • Here --

  • (Laughter)

  • We actually have two Atlases.

  • (Laughter)

  • Now, everything doesn't go exactly the way it's supposed to.

  • (Laughter)

  • (Laughter)

  • (Laughter)

  • And here's our latest robot, called "Handle."

  • Handle is interesting, because it's sort of half like an animal,

  • and it's half something else

  • with these leg-like things and wheels.

  • It's got its arms on in kind of a funny way,

  • but it really does some remarkable things.

  • It can carry 100 pounds.

  • It's probably going to lift more than that,

  • but so far we've done 100.

  • It's got some pretty good rough-terrain capability,

  • even though it has wheels.

  • And Handle loves to put on a show.

  • (Laughter)

  • (Applause)

  • I'm going to give you a little bit of robot religion.

  • A lot of people think that a robot is a machine where there's a computer

  • that's telling it what to do,

  • and the computer is listening through its sensors.

  • But that's really only half of the story.

  • The real story is that the computer is on one side,

  • making suggestions to the robot,

  • and on the other side are the physics of the world.

  • And that physics involves gravity, friction, bouncing into things.

  • In order to have a successful robot,

  • my religion is that you have to do a holistic design,

  • where you're designing the software, the hardware and the behavior

  • all at one time,

  • and all these parts really intermesh and cooperate with each other.

  • And when you get the perfect design, you get a real harmony

  • between all those parts interacting with each other.

  • So it's half software and half hardware,

  • plus the behavior.

  • We've done some work lately on the hardware, where we tried to go --

  • the picture on the left is a conventional design,

  • where you have parts that are all bolted together,

  • conductors, tubes, connectors.

  • And on the right is a more integrated thing;

  • it's supposed to look like an anatomy drawing.

  • Using the miracle of 3-D printing,

  • we're starting to build parts of robots

  • that look a lot more like the anatomy of an animal.

  • So that's an upper-leg part that has hydraulic pathways --

  • actuators, filters --

  • all embedded, all printed as one piece,

  • and the whole structure is developed

  • with a knowledge of what the loads and behavior are going to be,

  • which is available from data recorded from robots

  • and simulations and things like that.

  • So it's a data-driven hardware design.

  • And using processes like that,

  • not only the upper leg but some other things,

  • we've gotten our robots to go from big, behemoth, bulky, slow, bad robots --

  • that one on the right, weighing almost 400 pounds --

  • down to the one in the middle which was just in the video,

  • weighs about 190 pounds,

  • just a little bit more than me,

  • and we have a new one,

  • which is working but I'm not going to show it to you yet,