Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #412

So BigDog became LS3, which is the big load-carrying one.

Just, just a quick pause. It can carry 400 pounds and-

It was designed to carry 400, but we had it carrying about 1,000 pounds, uh, one time. (laughs)

Of course you did. (laughs) Just to make sure.

We had one carrying the other one. We had two of them, so we had one carrying the other one.

So one of the things that stands out about the robots Boston Dynamics have created is how beautiful the movement is, how natural the walking is and r- running is, even flipping is, throwing is. So maybe you can talk about what, what's involved in making it look natural.

Well, I think having good hardware is part of the story, and people who think you don't need to innovate hardware anymore are wrong.

The following is a conversation with Marc Raibert, a legendary roboticist, founder and longtime CEO of Boston Dynamics, and recently, the executive director of the newly created Boston Dynamics AI Institute that focuses on research and the cutting edge, on creating future generations of robots that are far better than anything that exists today. He has been leading the creation of incredible legged robots for over 40 years, at CMU, at MIT, the legendary MIT Leg Lab, and then of course, Boston Dynamics, with amazing robots like BigDog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle. This was a big honor and pleasure for me. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Marc Raibert. When did you first fall in love with robotics?

Well, I was always a builder from a, from a young age. I wa- I was lucky. My father was a, uh, frustrated, uh, engineer, and by that I mean, uh, he wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but his mom, from the old country, thought that that would be like a grease monkey. (laughs)

Mm-hmm.

And so she said no, so he became an accountant. But the, but the result of that was our basement was always full of, uh, tools and equipment and electronics and, you know, from a young age I would watch him, uh, assembling a kit, an ICO kit or something like that. I still have a couple of his old ICO kits. And, uh, but it was really, uh, during graduate school when, uh, uh, I followed, uh, a professor back, uh, from class. It was, uh, Berthold Horn at MIT, and I was taking a, uh, an interim class. It's IAP, Independent Activities Period.

Mm-hmm.

And I followed him back to his lab, and on the table was a, a Vicarm robot arm taken apart in probably a thousand pieces. And, uh, when I saw that, you know, from that day on, uh, I was a roboticist. (laughs)

Do you remember the year?

1974.