If you\u2019re lucky<\/span>, once a year you get to put together a panel built on pure kismet. Pairing Gill Pratt with Marc Raibert was exactly that for me. The two go back several decades, to the salad days of MIT\u2019s Leg Lab.<\/p>\n [A version of this story original appeared in TechCrunch\u2019s robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe for free here<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n Raibert founded the lab at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1980, before moving operations to MIT. The team was focused on robot locomotion research that would pave the way for Boston Dynamics\u2019 work.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we first got started, all robots that had legs were very slow moving, crab-like things that would hug the ground and then tentatively take a step and hope that things didn\u2019t topple over and then move like a slow-moving spider,\u201d says Raibert. \u201cI was interested in how animals work, and I looked at that and said, \u2018Wow, this is about as far from right as you can get.\u2019 I went the other way to see if we can do something where the dynamics and the energy in the machine [were] part of the story, and springs and bouncing were part of the story. My lab worked on that. We built pogo stick robots.\u201d<\/p>\n Raibert ran the lab for 15 years. A number of future robotics luminaries would make their way through the program, including AI ethics professor Joanna Bryson, research scientist Jerry Pratt, WobbleWorks co-founder Peter Dilworth, artist Daniel Paluska and CSAIL professor\/Toyota Research Institute (TRI) VP Russ Tedrake. And Agility Robotics co-founder Jonathan Hurst was a visiting student from CMU one summer.<\/p>\n Raibert and Pratt first crossed paths when the latter was a student at MIT. Raibert would found Boston Dynamics in 1992, handing the Leg Lab keys over to Pratt three years later.<\/p>\n \u201cMarc was an incredibly generous professor,\u201d Pratt says of their early days. \u201cOne of the wonderful things about MIT at the time and Marc in particular is that I was this young kid, and both as a graduate student and then a young professor, he welcomed me. For a while, both of us were working in the Leg Lab at the same time, and Marc had done this extraordinary work on robots that run. I decided that maybe I would work on robots that walk. That\u2019s how we intersected then, and then when he went off to form Boston Dynamics, he was very kind and basically gave me the lab and all the stuff that was there.\u201d<\/p>\n Pratt remained in academia for the next two decades, transferring from MIT to Olin in 2001. Nine years later, he became a program manager at DARPA. It was there the two crossed paths yet again. Boston Dynamics designed Atlas for DARPA. The humanoid robot made its\u00a0debut in 2013<\/a>\u00a0and has since become a mainstay in robotics challenges.<\/p>\n Three years later, Pratt was named TRI\u2019s CEO. Raibert continued as Boston Dynamics\u2019 CEO until 2019, handing the reins over to longtime employee Rob Playter, who managed the company\u2019s shift to more commercial pursuits. Last year, Raibert (who still serves as BD\u2019s chairman) founded the Boston Dynamics AI Institute. The organization has a lot in common with TRI. Both are dedicated to pure research, with the backing of two major automakers (Toyota and Hyundai).<\/p>\n I recognize that \u201cpure research\u201d is a bit of a loaded term. The concept is certainly a hopeful one: finding a method that can sustain research outside of the pressures of academia and corporate R&D.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Asked whether there is pressure from Toyota to productize, Pratt says, \u201cThere actually is not, and I\u2019m not saying that just to be nice. I think one of the great things about companies that have existed for long times is that this isn\u2019t the first time that they\u2019ve done R&D. Certainly most of the R&D budget inside of Toyota is spent figuring out how to make the next car or maybe the car five years from now. But there\u2019s this notion \u2014 and I\u2019m sure Hyundai shares this \u2014 that we\u2019re at the once-in-a-century time for transformation in the car industry. Battery electric vehicles are much simpler to make than cars have been in the past \u2014 no engine, no transmission, etc. So, we\u2019re going to have to compete in a much fiercer way in cars. But also, can we use the skills, the dreams and the hopes of the company to go beyond cars? TRI\u2019s job is to actually think about [what\u2019s] next. What\u2019s next after cars, as well some fancy stuff on cars.\u201d<\/p>\n For TRI, much of the \u201cwhat\u2019s next\u201d focuses on supporting aging populations. The organization invests a good portion of its resources to building out technology designed to helper older people live more independently. That\u2019s at the root of the research we shared from the\u00a0institute last week<\/a>. Note senior research scientist Benjamin Burchfiel:<\/p>\n We\u2019ve seen some big progress with the advent of [large language models], using them to impart this high level of cognitive intelligence into robots. If you have a robot that picks up a thing, now instead of having to specify an object, you can tell it to pick up the can of Coke. Or you can tell it to pick up the shiny object, or you can do the same thing and do it in French. That\u2019s really great, but if you want a robot to plug in a USB device or pick up a tissue, those models just don\u2019t work. They\u2019re really useful, but they don\u2019t solve that part of the problem. We\u2019re focused on filling in that missing piece, and the thing we\u2019re really excited about now is that we actually have a system and that the fundamentals are correct.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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