Atlas boston workshop

When trying something new, robots, like humans, don't get it right every time. There might be dozens of crashes for every one success. Marc Raibert: We break them all the time. I mean, it's part of our culture. We have a motto, "Build it, break it, fix it. To do that, Boston Dynamics has recruited roboticists with diverse backgrounds - there's plenty of Ph. D's, but also bike builders, and race car mechanics.

Bill Washburn is part of that pit crew. Bill Washburn: The biggest-- kinda failures for me are, like, the bottom part of the robot breaks off of the top part of the robot. Marc Raibert: We spent at least six months, maybe eight, just preparing for what we were gonna do. And then we started to get the technical teams working on the behavior.

The behavior was dancing. All their robots got in on the act. The movements were cutting edge, but the music and the Mashed Potato were definitely oldschool. Marc Raibert: This process of, you know, doing new things with the robots lets you generate new tools, new approaches, new understanding of the problem-- that takes you forward.

But, man, isn't it just fun? The South Korean carmaker, Hyundai, has agreed to buy a majority stake for more than a billion dollars. It'll be Boston Dynamics' third owner in eight years. There's pressure to turn their research into revenue.

And Boston Dynamics hopes this new robot will help. It's called Stretch and it's due to go on sale next year. This is the first time they've shown it publically. Stretch may not be that exciting to look at, but it's built with a definite purpose in mind. It's got a seven-foot arm and they say it can move boxes an hour in a warehouse and work for up to 16 hours without a break.

Unlike many industrial robots that sit in one place, stretch is designed to move around. Kevin Blankespoor: You can drive it around with a joystick. And at times, that's the easiest way to get it set up. But once it's ready to go in a truck and unload it, you hit go and from there on it's autonomous. And it'll keep finding boxes and moving 'em until it's all the way through. Robert Playter: This generation of robots is gonna be different. They're gonna work amongst us. They're gonna work next to us-- in ways where we help them but they also take some of the burden from us.

Anderson Cooper: The more robots are integrated into the workforce, the more jobs would be taken away. Robert Playter: At the same time, you're creating a new industry.

We envision a job-- we-- we-- we like to call the robot wrangler. He'll launch and manage five to 10 robots at a time and sort of-- keep them all working. Marc Raibert: A car with an active suspension essentially legs like w-- like a roller skating robot. And a robot like that, you know, could go anywhere on earth. That's one thing that maybe we'll do at some point. But, you know, really, the sky's the limit.

There's-- there's all kinds of things we can and will do. As with so many things Boston Dynamics does. It's hard to imagine how that would work, but then again, who'd have thought a bunch of metal machines would one day show us all how to do the Mashed Potato.

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SPEED 2. Whole-Body Coordination and Dynamic Motion. Atlas leverages its whole body to move with human-like grace and speed. Behavior Libraries. After this happy accident and exploration of the sector, they developed their prototype Handle robot to zero in on warehousing needs. With Atlas, they had a robot capable of running, jumping, picking up boxes and even a light session of parkour.

However, this was top-of-the-line tech designed to demonstrate what could be done. Boston Dynamics engineers needed to pare things back and concentrate on the day-to-day of warehouse operations. There were just a lot fewer moving parts. It was going to be lower cost and complexity. Using this base, Boston Dynamics was able to explore the problems and complexities in terms of moving goods in distribution centres with real-world tests. They needed a more elegant, smaller alternative, which comes in their latest Stretch model.