Over the last few years, the Boston Dynamics Spot robot has evolved in capabilities and functionalities. Although the outside world has doubts about the commercial use of this robot, many verticals are interested in finding and deploying this technology. The result of this is the company began selling back in June and has reportedly already sold more than 250 of its $75,000 Spot robots since then.
One of Spot’s many attractive capabilities is that it is positioned as a platform for developers and third parties, who can build their own accessories for a variety of different applications, from construction to telemedicine. Moreover, Boston Dynamics is also actively developing its own accessories to help diversify Spot’s applications.
Now, the company has announced that the Spot is getting more payloads next year, including a recharging station and a robotic arm. An arm add-on, which offers six degrees of freedom, is designed to move along with the robot. It would be capable of performing a wide variety of tasks, including opening doors and picking up objects. We’ve already seen Spot with an arm in some of its earliest demo videos.
Likewise, they are preparing a charging base to which the robot can go by itself to recharge its battery. Here there is not much mystery, the charging base stays fixed in one place, and the dog goes to it when it needs to recharge. It does it autonomously and simply lays on it to start charging, just like any robot vacuum cleaner does these days. They will be external accessories that can be purchased together with the robot itself.
“Like the base robot, there’s much more to the arm than just hardware. It will ship with an intuitive UI, and be equipped to operate through both telemanipulation and supervised autonomous behaviors via the tablet,” Boston Dynamics’ new CEO Rob Playter told TechCrunch. Developers can also access arm/gripper through API.
