Day: April 17, 2024

U.S. Commercial Drone Delivery Comes Closer

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Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to tough problems. I’m your host, Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before I start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage of some of Spectrum’s most important beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.org/newsletters to subscribe. We’ve been covering the drone delivery company Zipline in Spectrum for several years, and I do encourage listeners to check out our great onsite reporting from Rwanda in 2019 when we visited one of Zipline’s dispatch centers for delivering vital medical supplies into rural areas. But now it’s 2024, and Zipline is expanding into commercial drone delivery in the United States, including into urban areas, and hitting some recent milestones. Here to Continue reading U.S. Commercial Drone Delivery Comes Closer→

Boston Dynamics’ Robert Playter on the New Atlas

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Boston Dynamics has just introduced a new Atlas humanoid robot, replacing the legendary hydraulic Atlas and intended to be a commercial product. This is huge news from the company that has spent the last decade building the most dynamic humanoids that the world has ever seen, and if you haven’t read our article about the announcement (and seen the video!), you should do that right now. We’ve had about a decade of pent-up questions about an all-electric productized version of Atlas, and we were lucky enough to speak with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter to learn more about where this robot came from and how it’s going to make commercial humanoid robots (finally) happen. Robert Playter was the Vice President of Engineering at Boston Dynamics starting in 1994, which I’m pretty sure was back when Boston Dynamics still intended to be a modeling and simulation company rather than a robotics Continue reading Boston Dynamics’ Robert Playter on the New Atlas→

Hello, Electric Atlas

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Yesterday, Boston Dynamics bid farewell to the iconic Atlas humanoid robot. Or, the hydraulically-powered version of Atlas, anyway—if you read between the lines of the video description (or even just read the actual lines of the video description), it was pretty clear that although hydraulic Atlas was retiring, it wasn’t the end of the Atlas humanoid program at Boston Dynamics. In fact, Atlas is already back, and better than ever. Today, Boston Dynamics is introducing a new version of Atlas that’s all-electric. It’s powered by batteries and electric actuators, no more messy hydraulics. It exceeds human performance in terms of both strength and flexibility. And for the first time, Boston Dynamics is calling this humanoid robot a product. We’ll take a look at everything that Boston Dynamics is announcing today, and have even more detail in this Q&A with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter. Boston Dynamics’ new electric humanoid has Continue reading Hello, Electric Atlas→