The Curious Failures of General Purpose Robots

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Atlas is really a general robot platform. And it's perhaps not best suited for the specific tasks of that contest. This is the curse of a general purpose robot that they're not perfect at any one thing. But they might be able to do a wide variety of things. That is the goal at the end of the day.

Robert Playter is CEO of Boston Dynamics, a legendary robotics company that over 30 years has created some of the most elegant, dextrous, and simply amazing robots ever built, including the humanoid robot Atlas and the robot dog Spot. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:18) – Early days of Boston Dynamics
(15:39) – Simplifying robots
(19:37) – Art and science of robotics
(24:20) – Atlas humanoid robot
(41:14) – DARPA Robotics Challenge
(55:34) – BigDog robot
(1:09:23) – Spot robot
(1:30:48) – Stretch robot
(1:33:36) – Handle robot
(1:39:10) – Robots in our homes
(1:47:57) – Tesla Optimus robot
(1:56:39) – ChatGPT
(1:59:43) – Boston Dynamics AI Institute
(2:01:14) – Fear of robots
(2:11:36) – Running a company
(2:17:13) – Consciousness
(2:24:46) – Advice for young people
(2:26:42) – Future of robots