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Comment by cobookman | Hacker News Reader

Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992. That was almost 30 years ago.

Just me, or is it crazy they haven't had 1 year of profitability in nearly 3 decades of operations.

Many don't realize that for the first ~decade of its existence, BD was not the robotics/hardware business, but rather developed and sold human simulation software. Their main product, DI-Guy[1], was a modest success, and eventually provided the underpinnings for BD's core biomechanics sim tools.

When they got back into the hardware business in the early 2000's, those projects were primarily funded by DARPA/DOD contracts, but the steady income stream provided by e.g. DI-Guy helped fill the gaps between contracts, allowing them to run a business that, though lean, stayed in the black. Eventually, as a part of the Google acquisition, DI-Guy was divested to VT MAK, another local company in the modeling/sim software business [2].

Source: former employee that worked at BD for the better part of a decade from the mid 00's to late 10's

[1]: https://www.mak.com/products/visualize/di-guy [2]: https://www.mak.com/products/visualize/70-landing-pages-1/la...

As someone who is in the field of mobile robotics, what Boston Dynamics does is often way ahead of its time. Robotics is hard and expensive. If you are developing a new form of locomotion it will take years and millions of dollars before things work out. Heck, I myself have seen my colleagues spend 10+ years just ironing out issues with underwater vehicles before they even see the market.

Yeah. But the bewilderment isn’t a technical one, it’s a business one.

You’d think 30 years of unprofitable future tech would happen at a university or the military or some skunkworks operation for a massive company.

Though I’m sure quite a bit of their funding is military.

Boston dynamics has been all 3 of those... currently a skunkworks

why? what's happening that makes you say that

It was, before Google. It cost about US$120 million to get Big Dog working. At least those were the reported DARPA contract amounts.

Funny because yesterday there was a post on HN from a guy who made a DIY robot that looked very much like a small Big Dog.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24484129

This is a trend that gives me hope for the future. There's ever-increasingly advanced technology and technical knowledge accessible/affordable to the public, both hardware and software. What used to cost the military millions of dollars to develop, are now mass-produced and distributed, to fit in a pocket or to build one yourself.

Sure, the cutting edge stuff will always be in the realm of experts with funding, but the pace of progress in technology is such that there seem to be plenty of opportunities for innovation from the grassroots level, serious amateurs and hobbyists.

It kinda feels similar to the early era of personal computers, where anybody with interest and ideas could enter the field, learn things on their own, and even contribute to its advancement.

I don’t think it’s advancing technology that’s allowing this. It’s not physically constructing or programming a robot that’s so expensive, it’s iteration of designs to get to that point. A hobbyist can build a small working jet engine at home, but their hardly starting from scratch.

Further, building a modern full scale General Electric GE90 is extremely far beyond what a hobbyist can accomplish. If anything the true cutting edge is getting ever further out of reach. A few peasants could build a full scale trebuchet, good luck getting your friends together to build a F-22.

It’s also the availability of material and technology.

That just seems to move along in little tiny steps. No balance or slip recovery shown. That's the wind-up toy level of walking.[1]

Still, it shouldn't be that hard to make a small version of Big Dog technology now. They put a lot of money into fast hydraulic servos, which you no longer need for anything smaller than a horse. Gyros and accelerometers are cheap now, because they're phone parts. Motors and motor controllers are much better and cheaper now. Big Dog's compute power was a Pentium 4, which is nothing today. Force feedback sensors for the feet are still expensive, because there's no mass market. You need those for slip control.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wind-Up-Wooly-Walker/194850858

Underwater robotics PhD here. Completely seconded. Hardware is already complex. When the said hardware is mobile, complexity increases exponentially.

Agreed when you think of them as a normal business. it's bonkers, but if you're looking at it as a R&D shop - closer to pharma or biotech, it's less crazy (still a little crazy tho).

That's why it can really on be funded by guys like Alphabet who can take these R&D hits.

The bet really looks something iRobot - Every household has a robot servant/maid that's made by Boston Dynamics. Some of the more recent videos make me want to believe it's within my lifetime.

I love watching the documentaries (parodies) of how we get to Skynet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE

"Hi BD, here is $X if you poke around area Y so we can see if its feasible for the future."

Its easy to imagine they are operating as a test-bed company for ideas for the investor/3rd party/military. Before a real investment can happen they are used to prototype any 'far out' ideas.

There are several movies about robot uprisings etc and they often feature a mega corporation whose business is loosely speaking robotics.

I can picture that being Boston Dynamics when the robot uprising happens for real.

Those companies are always on top of the world in those movies, so maybe it will pan out after all.

> haven’t had one year of profitability

Also, beyond stakeholder investment, the contracts they had were often government contracts, or when in private companies it would be R&D, i.e. all made “at a loss” (until BR finds the right sauce).

Looking at the company's history it seems that it was pretty much a military research outfit for a long time.

They're basically a research and development firm. How many research teams do you know that are actually "profitable"? Money goes into research because it may pay dividends in a few decades, not because it's profitable in the first couple of decades.

> 30 years ago

Wow, that's long enough that their earliest patents would have expired by now.

US Government funded.

And people claim the markets/VCs are too short-termist. If anything, the opposite is true.

I don't think it's wise to extrapolation the intentions of VCs from a single example, especially when there are tens of thousands of counter examples.

I don't think their main funding is from vc? As mentioned above it's darpa contracts before internalized within Google so quite the opposite it seems

The markets and VC are too short-termist for things like this. The failure of many VC-funded robotics companies is evidence of this. Rethink Robotics. Jibo. Anki. I can keep going. The VCs ran out of patience long before the product gained market traction.

And Boston Dynamics is not an exception. Government funded primarily until 2013 when it was acquired by Google. Google then didn't have the stomach to continue to fund it, so they sold it to Softbank.[1]

[1] https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/06/09/its-no-wonder-googl...

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