Marc Raibert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Again, maybe you’ll arrange a robot meetup. But in general, what’s your view on competition in this space for especially humanoid and legged robots? Are you excited by the competition or the friendly competition? I don’t think about competition that much. I’m not a commercial guy. I think for the many years I was at Boston Dynamics, we didn’t think about competition. We were just doing our thing there. It wasn’t like there were products out there that we were competing with. Maybe there was some competition for DARPA funding, which we got a lot of, got very good at getting. But even there, in a couple of cases where we might’ve competed, we ended up just being the robot provider, that is for the LittleDog program, we just made the robots. We didn’t participate as developers except for developing the robot. And in the DARPA robotics challenge, we didn’t compete. We provided the robots. In the AI world now, now that we’re working on cognitive stuff, it feels much more a competition. The entry requirements in terms of computing hardware and the skills of the team and hiring talent, it’s a much tougher place. So I think much more about competition now on the cognitive side. On the physical side, it doesn’t feel it’s that much about competition yet. Obviously, with 10 humanoid companies out there, 10 or 12, I mean there’s probably others that I don’t know about, they’re definitely in competition, will be in competition. How much room is there for a quadruped and especially a humanoid robot to become cheaper? So cutting costs, and how low can you go? And how much of it is just mass production? So questions of how to produce versus engineering innovation, how to simplify it.…

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