Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #374

And so our goal was a natural-looking gait. It was real- it was surprisingly hard to get that to work. Um, and we, but we did build a- an early machine. Uh, we called it Petman Prototype. It was the prototype before the Petman robot.

Mm-hmm.

And it had a really nice-looking, um, gait where, you know, it would stick the leg out. It would do heel strike first-

Mm-hmm.

... before it rolled onto the toe, so you didn't land with a flat foot. You extended your leg a little bit. Um, but even then, it was hard to get the robot to walk where it wou- when you're walking, that it fully extended its leg. And getting that all to work well took such a long time. In fact, I, I probably didn't really see the nice natural walking that I expected out of our humanoids until maybe last year. And the team was developing on our newer generation of Atlas, you know, some new techniques, um, uh, for developing a walking control algorithm. And they got that natural-looking motion as sort of a byproduct of a, of a just a different process they were applying to developing the control. So that probably took 15 years, uh, 10 to 15 years to sort of get that from, from, you know, the Petman Prototype was probably in 2008 and what was it? 2022. (laughs) Last year that I think I saw good walking on Atlas.

The following is a conversation with Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics, a legendary robotics company that over 30 years has created some of the most elegant, dextrous and simply amazing robots ever built, including the humanoid robot Atlas and the robot dog Spot, one or both of whom you've probably seen on the internet either dancing, doing back flips, opening doors, or, uh, throwing around heavy objects. Robert has led both the development of Boston Dynamics' humanoid robots and their physics-based simulation software. He has been with the company from the very beginning, including its roots at MIT, where he received his PhD in aeronautical engineering. This was in 1994. At the legendary MIT Leg Lab, he wrote his PhD thesis on robot gymnastics. As part of which, he programmed a bipedal robot to do the world's first 3D robotic somersault. Robert is a great engineer, roboticist and leader. And Boston Dynamics, to me, as a roboticist, is a truly inspiring company. This conversation was a big honor and pleasure, and I hope to do a lot of great work with these robots in the years to come. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert Playter. When did you first fall in love with robotics? (laughs) Let's start with love and robots.

Well, love is, is relevant because I think the, the fascination, the deep fascination is really about movement. And, uh, I was visiting MIT looking for a place to get a PhD, and I wanted to do some laboratory work. And, uh, one of my professors at, in the aero department said, "Go see this guy, Marc Raibert, down in the basement of the AI Lab." And so I walked down there and saw him. He showed me his robots, and he showed me this robot doing a somersault.