Boston Dynamics aims to build 1,000 robot dogs by 2019

Boston Dynamics is preparing to build its terrifying army of robot dogs, according to a Saturday report in Inverse.

The report says that the company has set a target date of July 2019 as the time it will be ready to manufacture 1,000 of its compact SpotMini models annually.

SpotMini is the smallest variant of Boston Dynamics’ many different models of robo-dogs yet at approximately two feet, nine inches tall.

It weighs “around 66 pounds” and has an hour and a half battery life, per TechCrunch, and the company has recently demonstrated all kinds of functionalities like opening doors for other robots and increasingly complicated navigational skills.

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Speaking last month at the CeBIT computer expo Hannover, Germany, [founder Marc Raibert] said Boston Dynamics is already testing SpotMini with potential clients in four categories: construction, delivery, security, and home assistance.

“We’ve built ten by hand, we’re building 100 with manufacturers at the end of this year, and at the end of 2019, we’re going to begin production at the rate of about 1,000 a year,” he said of SpotMini, a prototype of which sat the stage at his feet.

While the company already announced plans to launch commercially in 2019 with a limited run of robots already in pre-production, Inverse’s report has some new details, such as that the SpotMini is intended to eventually become a multi-use platform of sorts:

The overarching goal for the 26-year-old company is to become what Android operating system is for phones: a versatile foundation for limitless applications. That’s the plan, anyway.

 

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