Boston Dynamics will now sell its Spot robot for $74,500

PanARMENIAN.Net - Robotmaker Boston Dynamics has finally put its four-legged robot Spot on general sale. After years of development, the company began leasing the machine to businesses last year, and is now letting any U․S․ firm buy their very own Spot for $74,500, The Verge reports.

It’s a hefty price tag, equal to the base price for a luxury Tesla Model S. But Boston Dynamics says, for that money, you’re getting the most advanced mobile robot in the world, able to go pretty much anywhere a human can (as long as there are no ladders involved).

Although Spot is certainly nimble, its workload is mostly limited right now to surveying and data collection. Trial deployments have seen Spot create 3D maps of construction sites and hunt for machine faults in offshore oil rigs. Less routine tests include helping hospitals triage COVID-19 patients and, somewhat controversially, working with a police bomb squad.

Boston Dynamics’ pitch is that Spot is a multipurpose “mobility platform” that can be customized with different sensors and programmed to perform patrols and inspections.

“We mostly sell the robot to industrial and commercial customers who have a sensor they want to take somewhere they don’t want a person to go,” Boston Dynamics’ lead robotics engineer, Zack Jackowski, told The Verge last week. “Usually because it’s dangerous or because they need to do it so often that it would drive someone mad. Like carrying a camera around a factory 40 times a day and taking the same pictures each time.”