The robotic pooch from Boston Dynamics’ viral videos is ready for real work
The robotic pooch from Boston Dynamics’ viral videos is ready for
real work
BY SEAN
CAPTAIN November 18,
2019 800 PM
In September, though, the company (which was previously part of
Alphabet’s X research arm) started leasing Spots to companies that want to put
it to work, at least in pilot projects. (It reportedly plans to build 1,000
Spots for customers by mid-2020.) The first to debut a full application using
Spot is a German-American firm called HoloBuilder. It’s equipped the robot to regularly
walk large construction sites, collecting 360-degree images, a la Google Street
View, so engineers can track the progress of work.
Spot got its first assignment, fittingly, in the Silicon Valley
area—surveying construction of the new
Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport
(SFO). HoloBuilder and construction firm Hensel Phelps ran multi-week pilot
tests in the spring and fall in which Spot briefly took over the painstaking
site surveying job that human field engineers normally do with handheld
360-degree cameras and HoloBuilder’s Reality Capture Platform software. “[It’s]
about freeing their time up to do something that is less repetitive,” says
HoloBuilder’s CMO Christian Claus.
The company announced the SFO project and plans for future tests
of the system, called SpotWalk, today at the Autodesk University conference in
Las Vegas. While HoloBuilder is the furthest along, it isn’t the only company
that aims to employ Spot in the building industry, and Boston Dynamics sees
construction surveying as one of the key markets for Spot.ROBO-DOG TRAINING
Boston Dynamics’s viral videos lost some of their
shine when it turned out that Spot was not navigating around
spaces based on its own intelligence but rather was being carefully
remote-controlled from offscreen. Once Spot has been steered through a route,
however, it can use its sensors and autonomous technology to retrace its steps,
avoiding obstacles that may pop up along the way.
So with SpotWalk, engineers first drive the dog by remote control
through an entire construction site, using HoloBuilder’s smartphone app. That
allows Spot to build a digital map that it uses to roam on its own in the
future. “Like a normal dog, you’d go and train it one time to say, that’s the
thing you should do,” says HoloBuilder founder and CEO Mostafa Akbari-Hochberg.
Engineers steer spot using a smartphone app. [Animation: courtesy
of HoloBuilder]HoloBuilder syncs Spot’s map with its own
digital maps used to track construction site progress. That allows engineers to
specify a list of locations where the robot will stop and snap new images once
or twice each day. (Humans only have time to do it about once a week.) “You can
see what happened in one location from one moment to the next so you can then
manage [the work],” says Claus. “You can travel back and forth in time to see
what the progress is.”
While Spot was learning how to navigate around the construction
site, its human coworkers learned to navigate around Spot. “I think we had
[confidence] that the technology works, but the [challenge] on a real-world job
site is to see how people react to it,” says Akbari-Hochberg, who claims
workers got used to Spot in a couple days. “It’s not anymore special after a
while,” he says.
He jokes that workers weren’t traumatized by a terrifying episode
of dystopian sci-fi show Black Mirror, featuring
killer robot dogs inspired by Spot. One of many differences: the Black
Mirror dogs could run, whereas Spot only trots about as fast
as an ambling human. Also, Spot isn’t equipped with weapons and programmed to
kill all humans.
FUTURE GIGS
HoloBuilder and Boston Dynamics will now expand SpotWalk to new
tests over the coming six months with “our most innovative customers that give
us direct feedback on early developments of ours,” says Claus.
Since its founding at the start of 2016, HoloBuilder has worked
with about 2,000 construction firms on about 18,000 projects. Many are giant
construction projects, done by companies such as Hensel Phelps (on the SFO
job), Bechtel, and Skanska.
SpotWalk is not a one-stop solution, though. Construction
companies have to arrange with Boston Dynamics to lease the robot. Then they
coordinate with HoloBuilder for the software and service.
Whether using humans or robots, HoloBuilder does more than collect
and organize the 360-degree images they shoot. It also employs machine vision
AI to make sense of them. “We now have the largest set of construction imagery,
which we can now analyze and understand what drywall is, what concrete beams
are, where a concrete column is,” says Akbari-Hochberg. The software can
recognize the installation of drywall panels, for instance, to report progress
on that phase of the work.
Seeing Spot trot around a busy construction site with lifelike
agility is awe-inspiring, but a closer look shows how far the tech is from
sci-fi. Spot only ventures where it’s been carefully instructed to go. It’s not
making any decisions on its own, other than how to avoid a crash. And it’s
certainly not ready to start hammering or welding. By taking on one of the
dullest tasks on a construction project, the bot shows promise—but there’s
no sign yet it will put any humans out of work.
Comments
Post a Comment