Marc Raibert — Founder and longtime CEO of Boston Dynamics, executive director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, pioneer of legged robots at CMU, MIT Leg Lab, and Boston Dynamics for over 40 years
The gist
Marc Raibert walks Lex Fridman through his career creating dynamic legged robots, beginning with a graduate-school fascination with a disassembled robot arm and a contrarian belief that robots should bounce and balance rather than crawl cautiously. He recounts building the first hopping machines at CMU and MIT, the evolution from Big Dog to LS3 to the electric Spot, and the engineering tradeoffs between hydraulics and electric actuation. The conversation explores what makes robot motion look natural, how robots stick landings and do somersaults, and Raibert's framing of intelligence as having an 'athletic' part and a 'cognitive' part. He describes the new AI Institute's 'watch, understand, do' moonshot for on-the-job-training robots and his philosophy of stepping stones to moonshots. Throughout, Raibert reflects on team-building, honest raw-footage videos, competitors like Tesla's Optimus, and his contrarian Hawaiian-shirt personality.
Big reveals
- Big Dog became LS3, designed to carry 400 pounds but tested carrying about 1,000 pounds, with one LS3 carrying another
- After showing a hopping-robot skeleton in a Samsonite suitcase, DARPA's Craig Fields gave Raibert $250,000 to fund the work
- Larry Page asked Raibert to make a ~60-pound, less-intimidating robot, which became the inspiration for Spot
- An Atlas video of climbing three big steps took 109 tries (about six weeks) with human-in-the-loop robot learning
- The new Boston Dynamics AI Institute aims to combine athletic intelligence with cognitive intelligence via a 'watch, understand, do' paradigm
- There are about 1,500 Spot robots deployed in practical applications, owned primarily by Hyundai now
Things worth remembering
- Raibert became a roboticist in 1974 after following MIT professor Berthold Horn to a lab and seeing a Vicarm robot arm in a thousand pieces
- His very first pogo-stick robot model was funded by $3,000 from Ivan Sutherland's endowed chair at Caltech
- Early hopping robots first floated on an inclined air table giving only six feet of travel before moving to a planarizer
- Boston Dynamics had an early motto: 'you have to run before you can walk'
- Wildcat, a quadruped, ran 19 mph on flat terrain and may be the fastest quadruped in the world, with neighbors complaining about its loud go-kart engine
- Raibert dissected an ostrich and learned its visible 'backwards knee' is actually the ankle and its 'foot' is an extended toe
- A football-sized hydraulic power supply weighs about 5 kilograms and produces 5 kilowatts of power
- Tad McGeer's passive-dynamics walker in the mid-to-late 1980s walked down an inclined plane with no computer, essentially a mechanical computer
- Raibert opened a Zurich office led by reinforcement-learning leader Marco Hutter, who remains half-time at ETH
- A well-known ballerina has been programming Spot, and Brown University runs a 'choreo robotics' class using two Spot robots