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A comment on 'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Covid-19 Patients.

Re:'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Co... by hprotagonist on Monday April 27, 2020 @09:36AM (#22995670)
This is your monthly reminder that Boston Dynamics is exceptionally good at product demos.

It remains much less clear that they’re any good at anything else.

Also, Spot looks like a Houndeye to me, so i keep waiting for it to make “wheeeennnnnnn BAM” noises.

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Re:'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Co... by me_me_me on Monday April 27, 2020 @11:21AM (#22996668)
> It remains much less clear that they’re any good at anything else.

They are also exceptionally good at building impressive robots.

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Re:'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Co... by hprotagonist on Monday April 27, 2020 @11:26AM (#22996715)
Not to be too blunt here, but: besides very impressive numbers of youtube views, what have those robots accomplished, in a “we have deployed X thousand of these in the following Y situations” sense, since 2006?

I’m (way more than) fine with blue sky work, and BD deserves credit for not building weapons, but at the same time there’s an impedance mismatch here.

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Re:'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Co... by JackFaker on Monday April 27, 2020 @11:37AM (#22996834)
If you're interested Adam Savage was allowed to use a 'Spot' robot for several months and shares some observations and information on actual usage on his youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-PdPtqw78k

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Re:'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Co... by hprotagonist on Monday April 27, 2020 @11:56AM (#22997021)
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/boston-dynamics-puts-its-r...

reading between the lines, as of Q4 last year they're still in _extremely_ early in any meaningful deployment. Lease-based alpha access to select customers, "hey we don't have to send a 12-man team out every month anymore", and carefully PRd information is certainly some kind of progress, but it's not anything like normal use.

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Re:'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Co... by JackFaker on Monday April 27, 2020 @12:34PM (#22997387)
Definitely not normal use, probably something akin to controlled alpha or beta testing. The only recent article a saw about the fall 2019 trials/leases was this article that didn't provide any meaningful details on usage.

https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/article/211286...

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