Talk 12: M. Da Silva, Boston Dynamics | ICRA2021 WS on Legged Robots

ICRA 2021 Workshop on Legged Robots (Towards Real-World Deployment of Legged Robots)

Title: Applying Spot to Real World Applications

Abstract
Spot, Boston Dynamics quadrupedal robot product, can reliably walk nearly anywhere a human can, but what does it do? While legged mobility is a necessary skill for many use cases, it’s not the only requirement for valuable producing applications. This talk will focus on the work we have done to develop Spot for remote and autonomous sensing applications: i) Encapsulating Spot’s mobility in an extensible API, ii) Building an autonomous capability, iii) Making it easy to add sensing to build value producing solutions.

Bio
Dr. Marco da Silva is a Principal Roboticist at Boston Dynamics. Marco currently manages the engineering team on Spot that develops autonomy, payloads and other software to make Spot useful for industrial applications. Prior to Spot, he was Atlas Platform Director at Boston Dynamics, a program to develop the world’s most advanced biped robot. Marco joined Boston Dynamics in 2010 after graduating with a PhD from MIT. Prior to that Marco worked at Pixar Animation Studios from 2001 to 2005.

This video was part of the ICRA 2021 5th Workshop on Legged Robots.