How much is that robo-dog in the window? $74,500
By Jordan Valinsky | CNN
Want a dog without the pain of house training it? Or feeding or walking it? Well, you still can’t have one, but Boston Dynamics has begun selling Spot, its robotic dog, to businesses. Spot is up for any task without the need for treats.
The company announced that businesses can pre-order Spot for a mere $74,500. The four-legged agile robot has garnered attention for the tasks it can perform, which include running, climbing stairs, and even reminding people to practice social distancing in the Covid-19 era.
Tuesday’s announcement opens availability up for the dog, which was previously used exclusively by “domestic and international businesses and research facilities,” the website said. It’s generally used for inspections on construction sites or similar situations.
“The combination of Spot’s sophisticated software and high performance mechanical design enables the robot to augment difficult or dangerous human work,” Marc Raibert, chairman and founder of Boston Dynamics, said in a release. “Now you can use Spot to increase human safety in environments and tasks where traditional automation hasn’t been successful.”
Spot is quite athletic. It can run about 5.2 feet per second, has cameras for eyes that give it a 360-degree range of vision, is dust- and water-proof, and can operate in temperatures ranging from -4 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
The dog will ship in 6 to 8 weeks.
Spot’s history
Boston Dynamics first introduced Spot in 2015. An introductory video collected 7.3 millions views, and additional videos about Spot have continued to draw attention over the years. After all, this robotic canine can twerk and moonwalk, and received an outpouring of sympathy on social media when its creators released a video of researchers kicking the dog to demonstrate its balance.
Boston Dynamics started in 1992 as a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was purchased by Google in 2013. Four years later, Google sold the company to Japan’s SoftBank — one of the firms behind Pepper, which is billed as the world’s first robot capable of reading human emotions.