Form & Function of Enterprise Humanoid Design | Boston Dynamics
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Form & Function of Enterprise Humanoid Design
Thanks for joining us. I'm Chris Thorne. I'm here with Aaron Yabroff and James Kuzio. We'll be discussing the new Atlas hardware design today. I lead the Atlas hardware team. I've been at Boston Dynamics for about 15 years, over half of that was working on Atlas exclusively. Prior to joining BD, I was at the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where I received my PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Aaron, can you give us a little bit of background on yourself. I've been working with Boston Dynamics for six years. I originally came on to lead the industrial design for the stretch program. Prior to that, I worked for design agencies for about 25 years, working in medical devices for the first part of that, and then eventually transitioning over to consumer products. At the tail end of that work, I led the design on the Spot program. Great. James, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to Boston Dynamics? Sure. I just joined BD about nine months ago. Prior to that, I spent the first part of my career in automotive. And right before this, I was in additive manufacturing. But in between that, I spent 12 years in consumer electronics at Apple, where I led product design for the Mac division. So a lot of people that work at Boston Dynamics love to talk about their first time seeing the robots in real life, so I thought it'd be fun to see what your guys' experience were. I'm going to talk about the first time I saw Atlas because that was truly memorable. And there's lots of videos of Atlas on YouTube and whatnot, and I've seen them all. But when you're watching a video on YouTube, something in the back of your mind is telling you, this isn't real. This is AI. When you're in the lab and you see Atlas standing in front of you doing its thing, your brain at first wants to say, this can't be real. But then you realize, no, this is right in front of me. This is as real as it gets. And I'm just getting goosebumps now thinking of that moment because it was-- I don't have that anymore. And that's a shame because it's just so natural to me to be around these robots. But I'll never forget that first day. How about you? The first time I saw a Boston Dynamics robot in person was the Hydraulic Spot. And at this point, I have a hard time remembering seeing it in person versus seeing it on YouTube, having it be kicked by somebody at Boston Dynamics. But the first time I ever saw a Boston Dynamics robot, it was made aware of the company was in the early '90s, where I saw one of the two-legged robots on a video. And it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. It seemed like the world was going to change and this was right around the corner. And I never expected that I would be working for the company one day. Yeah. I think for me, the first time I saw the robots, or some of them anyway, was during my interview. And I did my presentation. They took me through the lab to look at-- I think I saw Sand Flea, LS3, Cheetah, and maybe a few others, and just thinking it was like the coolest thing I've ever seen. And when we were doing it, they were asking me a ton of questions about the robots. Why do you think we did this? Or how do you think this works? And I didn't even realize at the time that it was still part of the interview. And then I went back to my hotel room and talked to my wife, and I said, I can't believe this is a real job. I can't believe people get paid to do this. I need to work there. This is literally a dream job for a mechanical engineer. So, Aaron, when you first arrived at BD, we had just started our Spot product journey and you were just starting to think about what our design language was for our products. How is your thinking in that area evolved over time? And how does it apply to the new Atlas design? So when I first came on to BD, I'd been working with Spot for three years. When we first started that program, the real challenge was how do we make this otherworldly robot look like a product. That's really what our design goal was. And the challenge there is a lot of companies, a lot of people really want to make these robots look like the robots that they grew up with, what they expect a robot to look like, which usually is something from science fiction, a movie prop, or a costume. And that's not really delivering on what a product needs to be. So when we were thinking about Spot, we were thinking about, well, how is this robot going to be used. And we didn't quite know. And we were still exploring all of the possibilities. So we're thinking about this as a modular platform that our customers could use as they saw fit and allow them to put their products on the back of it, whether that's instrumentation, or something that would measure something during inspection. We were really...