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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

HN was saying that Google acquired Boston Dynamics specifically to dismantle it.

Thoughts?

This was more than a random HN comment. There seemed to be several persuasive reasons why Google would do something like that.

Note that three years ago, the general sentiment was that Boston Dynamics was pretty scary: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=boston%20dynamics%20google&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7103433

"Technically, since their acquisition Boston Dynamics, Google is indeed in the business of war robots: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/google-buys-major-military... "

Is there a chance that Google stayed ahead of the curve and prevented Boston Dynamics from pursuing that?

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This is nerd fever dreaming conspiracy bullshit, if they were really building such scary capable war machines for the defense department they would have been bought long, long ago by a big defense contactor (and likely that would be the last we'd publically hear about it!).

Fact is that Boston Dynamics does one thing, really, really well engineered dynamic locomotion. From what I understand there's very little ML/AI to it, just really good modeling and engineering.

However, no one has quite figured out exactly where this technology will be most useful or practical in the near future. Even (maybe especially) when they were owned by Alphabet.

> Fact is that Boston Dynamics does one thing, really, really well engineered dynamic locomotion. From what I understand there's very little ML/AI to it, just really good modeling and engineering.

as someone who did a bit of graduate research in that area, i would debate the "really, really well engineered" part of that statement. they brute-forced the engineering and developed energetically expensive machines that were great as demos but not practical as products. compare how long one of their robots last vs any legged creature of comparable size, and the poor energetics are obvious.

i would speculate that their company was a bet that battery packs would become light enough yet have a high enough energy density that it's robots could one day become viable products, but it doesn't seem like they're winning that bet.

that's in contrast to the segway, which was a bet that computing power was fast enough to dynamically adjust and balance human scale motion with high dynamic stability. they won the technical bet, but still lost the productization bet.

The energetics of the robots are constrained by size, weight and power requirements of the components on the market. As such sure, mechanical walkers will always be much less energy efficient than wheeled vehicles of the same era. Their competition on the rough terrain however is not Segway but flying drones, which are much less energy efficient than walkers still.

There isn't any particular inefficiency in their walker balancing implementation.

but that's just it. the design presupposes an industrial mindset of motors and gears and pistons and rigid metal structures. it presupposes active control and computational power. it presupposes an unlimited energy supply, as would be found in a manufacturing plant.

but if we just look around, we find a huge array of locomoting, self-contained, relatively energy efficient beings to draw inspiration from.

for example, the tendons and muscles in your leg can return as much as 40% of the energy expended in locomoting. and your legs include passive mechanisms (like how your knee joint locks and the alignment of the cruciate ligaments inside it) to keep you mostly upright without a lot of active control.

nature has ingenious solutions to learn from and take advantage of.

Can you suggest another company that produces legged platforms with similar capabilities and better energy efficiency?

Any mule or horse rental company.

http://www.sombrero.com/trips/hunting/

I still don't understand the commercial value / applications of legged platforms to begin with. What are people using these for outside of hobbies, wooing government reps with deep pockets, and novelty?

Humanoid robots can fit into existing environments without extensive adaption. And humans have legs.

Irrelevant in a factory, where you can adapt things as much as you like - but crucial if you envisage people sending robots to environments they don't own - like a robot carer helping Grandma go to the store.

Needless to say, the profitable applications for this aren't especially short-term, so the ROI for this research is hard to predict.

The store Grandma is going to is probably already wheelchair accessible, so a wheeled robot would work fine.

I'm sure that's the case where you live, but where I live our public transport isn't 100% disabled-accessible.

If you prefer, you can substitute "Like a robot delivery driver, who must deliver to flats without lifts" or "Like a robot cop, chasing truant teens through a mall" [1]

[1] http://pbfcomics.com/comics/truancy-bot/

Fwiw we already have mall cop robots in California: https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15432280/security-robot-k...

They cost about $7/hr each to employ (~$62k annually since they're 24.7): https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/knightscope-robots-i...

heh... it was springbreak

They briefly convinced the Army/Marines that they could make electric/hydraulic mules to assist soldiers in carrying their gear in terrain without roads. But they were too loud - at that point, might as well insert troops/material by helicopter or use horses/mules. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/...

Seems like a classic case of poorly chosen requirements. Someone specced a robotic mule with such-and-such range, carrying capacity and features, and forgot to add 'also must be quieter than weed whacker'.

Stairs? Or any other rough terrain where wheels are insufficient.

A robotics mentor once told me "just use bigger wheels" for rough terrain rather than legs and fancy control algorithms. But stairs are particularly difficult for wheels. House bots will almost certainly need legs to maximize utility. Unless they are so cheap you can get one for every surface.

> wheels are insufficient

Tell that to these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1apqfrJYwk. I think one day we have have two wheeled robots with these kind of capability.

That is badass. And energy intensive. I do think we will have legged/wheel hybrids rolling for efficiency and walking/hopping/etc for the difficult parts. He was certainly using his legs to perform those maneuvers. Wheels only can't bounce up. Wheelies, but not the hopping part. Wheelies + AWD may do it though. Good perspective. Thank you.

You mean like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c

It's hard to change the stance on a wheeled vehicle, I think that agriculture might be one domain where a legged platform could develop an advantage (if it were sufficiently energy efficient to begin with, wheels really are the greatest human invention).

Legged for agriculture, to handle uneven terrain? Outside of reforestation, I don't see how it can be a significant advantage? In soil-based growing, one needs to maintain the soil/ground and making/keeping it flat becomes a relatively minor point. For soil-less (hydroponics etc), I'd expect the whole 'field' to be automated, possibly with the produce moving instead of moving to the produce. This how modern salad farming happens for instance.

> Legged for agriculture, to handle uneven terrain?

That's one, and also a much smaller footprint than a wheeled vehicle.

> This how modern salad farming happens for instance.

And mushrooms too.

Mushrooms too.

One thing I keep in mind is that handwaving, overly dismissive criticisms tend to stem from the need to feel superior rather than actual shortcomings of the product.

Maybe there's still merit to BD's approach. The rule is: first make it work, then make it good, then make it fast (i.e. optimize). It's probably easier to find plenty of ways to incrementally improve on a working platform than to dream up those improvements completely from scratch.

To me though a better approach would be:

1. wheeled sidewalk robots. 2. wheeled robot with arms 3. walking robot.

Still incremental just have sellable robots the whole time.

Their newest robot, the one with wheels for feet, is quite efficient. You need legs to traverse complex terrain. Adding wheels for efficiency after you've developed decent legs just makes sense.

The military version, the Legged Squad Support System, was tested by the USMC at Quantico. They decided not to buy it. Too noisy for combat, too hard to fix in the field, not that useful to a Marine squad.[1]

The US Army was also trying some exoskeleton designs. The Raytheon XOS [2] was quite capable but needed an external power cable. The Lockheed HULC [3] finally reached a self-powered configuration, but battery life was too short.

None of these will be fielded. Maybe the next generation.

The Army's next big "mobility" buy is a replacement for the HUMMV, an armored truck from Oskosh. Smaller than the MRAP, but a comparable level of protection. Boring, but useful.

[1] http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/12/22/marine-corps-s...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V87lSB5XWVs

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kat8I5UM_Vs

Strapping a high-density power source to a man (or machine) in a bullet ridden environment sounds like a terrible idea.

I imagine we'll see progress on this front when there's a breakthrough there. Barring that, you get some analog of the rocket equation: power source + fuel requires armor (for survivability) which means more power and fuel is required, etc etc

As the volume of the battery grows larger, the battery's mass grows cubically while the mass of the armor shielding it grows quadratically. It's nothing like the rocket equation problem.

I suppose you can cheat it this way: hide the power source behind just enough armor that when a soldier gets hit with something powerful enough to pierce it, he'll most likely be dead anyway.

Another avenue to cheat: put extra armor just around the fuel/power source.

I've seen enough action movies to know that the future is nuclear fuel cells the size of a hydroflask.

In future Boston, a miniaturized nuclear power cell may be able to power a whole building for 500 years, but it can only handle a mechanized exoskeleton for about 45 minutes.

And there is an additional settlement that needs saving?

> other avenue to cheat: put extra armor just around the fuel/power source.

Wouldn't that make it heavier and take away the advantage of having an exoskeleton in the first place?

I imagined something like the Soviet "Shtrafbat", battalions made up of prisoners and other undesirables.

Of couse the shtrafniks will die in a terrible conflagration when they bump their battery, but think of all the expensive equipment taxpayers can buy for them, and a use for the prison population! Of course the prisoners will be rented to the state for a nominal fee, and there will be compensation to PrisonCo when their property is damaged. It's a win-win-win!

No arguments but payloads and ammo are also things that enter bullet ridden environments.

Rifle ammo isn't explosive for the most part. For example, if you left it in a fire, it would cook off. The bullet would stay where it was more or less and the case would split open and fly a little ways.

Actually a pretty interesting theory, though it seems a bit like a futile pursuit since another company can just spring up to take their place, or their employees can simply leave.

It seems more likely that when Andy Rubin was placed in charge of Google's hardware, he made a string of robotics acquisitions in a long term bet on a household robot of some sort. In a short period of time, Google acquired 8 robotics companies, many of which specialized in various forms of locomotion which could be explored in parallel to find an optimal form of movement through unstructured environments.

These startups seemed to go nowhere since Rubin left not too long after the acquisitions were made. Hard to say why Rubin left at the time for sure.

So it seems more like Boston Dynamics were acquired for their incredible robotic locomotion, and Google's ambition to make a household robot (code named replicant, which is the term for an android in Blade Runner. By now I assume Rubin is a big fan), would fit with the fact that Boston dynamics adapted a lot of their previous efforts into designing lightweight low range robots suitable for navigating indoor unstructured environments.

This makes the most sense. Andy had leeway and some grand plan with regards to robotics but then something happened; he left and the units were left without a great unifying vision and thus more or less directionless and the new management didn't have a new vision for them so they looked to divest from them.

> Hard to say why Rubin left at the time for sure.

Rubin worked hard on Android and was ready to release to public. Then Jobs called Google pals and they all got in one room. Jobs called him "fucking dickless asshole" and that he ripped off many features of not-yet-released iPhone. Rubin know it was bullshit, but Jobs demanded plenty of functions to be removed. To his suprise, Google bros did bow to Jobs.

Rubin never had the same level of respect for Page or Brin ever since.

More to read: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-android-founder...

> [Steve Jobs said] ... that he ripped off many features of not-yet-released iPhone. Rubin know it was bullshit, ...

Except that the link you posted seems to disagree with your assessment:

"Ethan Beard, an early Android business development executive, told Vogelstein: "We knew that Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn't think it would be that good."

Google had phone software that was ready to launch at the end of the year, but it looked awful relative to the iPhone, so it was all scrapped and delayed. "What we had looked so ... nineties," an Android engineer said."

Under the direction of Rubin, Google scrapped their independent phone effort and started from scratch to try to match the iPhone feature wise, even though Page and Schmidt had promised Jobs privately that they wouldn't copy the iPhone.

Its Japans destiny to create replicants. Quite frankly, This aquisition is no surprise.

Japanese have a "national trauma" from Boston Dynamics - everything they invented in robotics Boston Dynamics brought to perfection, beating them in their own game. Happy now, they will be. Rejoice Hiroshi Ishiguro, he will. Walk Geminoid naturally, it will.

Actually as soon as I saw the headline, and knowing that SoftBank is Japanese, I was thinking of Gigantor and Astro Boy!!

You're thinking of Hugo, not Andy.

Rubin was married long before he left Google. He also has couple of kids now.

Rubin was married before Google bought Android, so that doesn't make any sense.

This is complete nonsense. The only sense in which Boston Dynamics is building "military" robots is that no one other than DARPA was willing to fund the development of these expensive toys. They have no real military use.

Andy Rubin and Larry Page were going to build "household helper" humanoid robots - no really, that was the grand vision - but it all fell apart.

I don't remember that sentiment.

It sounds like general fud against google but back then people had less to worry about.

Given the current political climate I would actually welcome a robot dystopia. as long as the robots were running it. not the politicians.

We assume that some horde of evil robots would put us out of our current misery faster and with greater efficiency than the powers that be, but what if the current powers replaced themselves with highly durable robots crafted in their own image, programmed to carry out their policies in absentia?

What if they were programmed to maximize our current pains?

> I would actually welcome a robot dystopia. as long as the robots were running it. not the politicians.

OK, but can I program the robots?

Hmm, do you frequently fail reCaptchas? If so, then yes please do.

Bought it, got all the secrets, all technology, software, made connections between key people, possibly made the company dependable on Google technology then sold it. Sounds like a perfect way to handle this.

I would hope so. Google's positive image has already declined significantly in the past few years due to its relentless chasing of more advanced tracking and data mining of user data. Becoming a country that sells war robots not just to the U.S. but also Saudi Arabia and others like it would've made me, and probably others, like it a lot less, too.

And equally importantly - how can we:

1) Establish consensus in favor of disrupting and retarding any movement toward war robots (or perhaps even coming to a more affirmative defense of the three laws)

2) Carry out the direct action associated with #1 above.

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