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Re:Boston Dynamics will start selling its dog-like SpotMini ... by fixermark on Monday May 14, 2018 @01:04PM (#17067191)
Possibly ironically, one of the reasons BD is looking for consumer-sale alternatives is that it specifically didn't meet the bar for military tech. The Big Dog project started as an idea for a field heavy-pack machine to offload some of the weight marines deep-inserted into a theater need to carry. It failed to meet either the noise limitation or power demand needs for that use-case.

Turns out for military applications, "Just send some trained dudes with guns" is a lot easier, still, than ground-based drones. Air drones are, of course, a whole different kettle of missiles<delete>fish.

Re:Boston Dynamics will start selling its dog-like SpotMini ... by gandreani on Monday May 14, 2018 @01:14PM (#17067285)
This seems like the most plausible theory to me. Even _if_ one day these robots can handle a lot of manual tasks, they won't have big enough batteries to last for more than a couple of hours unplugged