While two-legged humanoid robots are super-popular right now from manufacturers like Apptronik, Amazon (in partnership with Agility Robotics), Sanctuary AI, Figure.ai, Tesla, and Fourier Intelligence, it’s likely that robot innovation will diversify rather than consolidate over the next few years as we enter an emerging golden age of robotics. At least, that’s my key takeaway from a chat with some of the top scientists and engineers at Boston Dynamics, which pioneered humanoid robots with Atlas and is continuing to build multiple robots with different form factors. Investment in robotics dropped last year, but the global robotics market is forecasted to grow almost 15% annually until 2032. Increasingly robots will run like dogs, fly like birds, wriggle like snakes, swim like fish, roll like cars and—yes—walk like humans. There is no one right form factor, says Boston Dynamics senior technical director Alex Perkins. “The right form factor is whatever is the right form factor for the application you’re really targeting,” he told me in a recent TechFirst podcast. “We tend to gravitate towards things we know: human form, animal form, and there’s great utility and flexibility in those forms.” But, he adds, robot designs can be extremely specific for individuals tasks: even a stationery and immobile form like a common dishwasher. Interestingly, what we think of as the best and most adaptable robotics forms, like the bipedal, two-armed human form that we use to great effect for so many different kinds of tasks, are not always the best. “The first box moving we ever did was with Atlas, and as we started to understand that market more, we transitioned from this walking robot,” Boston Dynamics’ Mike Murphy, senior technical director and chief systems engineer, says. “And we get to Stretch where we have the static balance. So the evolution of form actually to suit the application is really one of the cool parts of the cusp of the golden age of robotics.”
Full report : Boston Robotics says that the world is at the cusp of golden age of robotics.
