As soon as Google announced it was acquiring the scary mechanical cheetah company Boston Dynamics, twitter exploded into a series of snarky comments about self-aware robots from a company that knows everything about you chasing after you to watch more YouTube.
Say what you will, Boston Dynamic is a fascinating company. I’ve marveled at BD’s robotics and have watched all the videos as they came out (Boing Boing has a nice collection of them) but David Pogue’s Making Stuff series on Nova has a segment which goes into a bit more detail along with an interview with the company’s founder.
The entire episode is fascinating but the Boston Dynamics segment starts at 19:30.
Other projects mentioned in the video include Festo’s Bionic Innovations
and UPenn’s GRASP labs research on swarming nanobots.
Thanks for hipping me to the amazing & scary as hell robots made by Boston Dynamics. Google is making some interesting & possibly scary acquisitions. 1st drones that could kill & now robots that could kill. Hmm.