[cbozeman]

A Spot costs about $75,000, so as far as trusting the organizations... I mean, I find myself seriously considering buying one.

Yes, I would likely have to add-on other modules over the course of time, but $75,000 for Spot's capabilities is actually pretty reasonable.

[Rebelgecko]

What would you use use it for if you had one?

[cbozeman]

Goofing off, most likely.

I haven't really thought of a use case for the home, although there's literally dozens of them. I actually wonder if it could function as an auto-dog walker for my organic dog on the days when I'm too swamped with work to do so.

The thought of attaching a leash to my dog and the leash to Spot while I'm indisposed is actually kind of attractive. I would have to make sure my dog has already done her business though, since I wouldn't want to be the kind of asshole that not only uses a robot to walk his dog, but also lets his dog shit on his neighbor's yard while a robot walks his dog.

[devchix]

> function as an auto-dog walker for my organic dog on the days when I'm too swamped

Be wary of renting to any penguin, if you do buy Spot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Trousers

[iancmceachern]

I wonder, would the time spent programming and integrating all this be less than just walking the dog? For me, this would defeat the purpose of having my dogs my our life.

Having worked in robotics quit a bit this is a common trap. There are plenty of things that we can think of for a robot to do, but most of them would require more concessions, programming and maintenance time than it takes to just do the task, or hire folks to do it. The areas where the value prop holds up it really works well, but these kind of low value, high complexity applications like walking a dog around the neighborhood without dragging it by it's collar if the dogs knee hurts and it walks slow that day.

A $75k robot arm with legs is not a completed application. We can already buy robots with the needed mobility to do things like walk dogs for far less. This is a classic hammer nail situation. I think this is the issue that BD keeps running into, they have an amazing team, amazing tech, amazing capabilities, but are still searching for that killer high value application. There are over 400k industrial robots sold every year, its a huge market. They sell well because it relatively straightforward to program and integrate them into workcells and factory lines to create value. To program and integrate one of these robots to do something so complex that it would necessitate a BD robot and not a standard industrial robot would be a huge development effort. It just doesn't hold up when we have folks that need work. The cost of one 75k robot plus two person years of engineering labor is 4 or 5 years worth of traditional labor. The value prop just isn't there until our ability to control, program and integrate these complex robots (cobot stuff) gets better.

[cbozeman]

> The value prop just isn't there until our ability to control, program and integrate these complex robots (cobot stuff) gets better.

When you ultimately drill down to brass tacks though, you're left with a chicken and egg scenario. We need better programming and integration for this to be time-effective. We need more time programming and more time integrating for this to be a value proposition.

You don't get there without some idiot like myself saying, "I could spend 1000 hours walking with my dog... or I could spend 1000 hours programming my robot to walk my dog..."

[iancmceachern]

My point exactly. Its not 1000 hours and 1000 hours. Its 1000 hours and 1,000,000 hours. If we could program a complex robot like spot to do a highly complex task like walk a dog safely on an open ended "real world" in 1000 hours there are lots of other things we would do first (package delivery comes to mind). We're just not there. We have the hardware, but not the software infrastructure to apply them as is being expected here.

[ralfd]

https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot

They promise "repeatable autonomous missions to gather consistent data", so my guess is programming a route and mapping terrain is reasonably easy. There is also remote control and camera access, if that could be triggered to automatically notify you (or a dog walking central command service supervising), for example when your dog is barking/complaining or resists to being dragged, it could go a long way to solve dog walking (for smaller dogs).

[iancmceachern]

But how? How do we program it to know when to call you? Its a non-trivial problem.

[andreareina]

According to BD Spot doesn't do well with moving objects and shouldn't be used around children, animals.

[Shared404]

$75,000 is far enough out of reach of the average person that I think I'm standing by my statement.