TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek November 23, 202021PHOTO
ILLUSTRATION
BY
731;
PHOTOS:
BOSTON
DYNAMICS
(1);
FORD
(2);
WOODSIDE
ENERGY
(1).
SPOT:
TRIMBLE
Human baseball fans weren’t allowed to attend
the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks game on July 7, but
that didn’t keep a collection of humanoid robots
from supporting the home team with a peppy fight
song while 20 mechanical dogs in baseball uni-
forms bopped along in unison. The canines were
made by Boston Dynamics, and their performance
perfectly illustrated the conundrum the company
has faced since its founding almost three decades
ago: It’s created what may be the world’s most
technologically sophisticated—and expensive—
parlor trick.
Boston Dynamics has long represented the cut-
ting edge of robotics in popular culture, captivating
YouTube audiences with the fluid movements of its
animal- and human-like machines. The company
has had bouts of profitability over its 28 years, but
recently it’s been losing millions of dollars annu-
ally, vexing SoftBank Group Corp., as it did its pre-
vious owner, Google. SoftBank is now preparing
to sell it to Hyundai Motor Co. for about $1 billion,
Bloomberg reported earlier in November.
The deal isn’t complete and would require
approval from the Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States (Cfius). Hyundai
and SoftBank declined to comment, and a spokes-
person would only say Boston Dynamics “continues
to excite partners interested in exploring a deeper
commercial relationship with our company.”
Boston Dynamics also recently changed its
longtime leader and hired its first head of sales.
Chief Executive Officer Rob Playter says SoftBank
was looking for profits. “While they want us to be
a disciplined and commercial company, the actual
direction of the company they are leaving to us,”
he says. “Pressure? Sure, there’s pressure.”
Playter became CEO late last year, replacing
Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics in
1992 as an outgrowth of his academic work on
walking robots at MIT. The company developed
an increasingly impressive series of machines that
moved in smooth, eerily lifelike ways. Many were
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency and other arms of the U.S. military.
Google purchased Boston Dynamics in 2013 and
cut short the company’s military contracting work
to focus on research and development. Owning
the company cost Google about $50 million annu-
ally, according to a person familiar with the matter
who asked not to be identified discussing private
information. It sold Boston Dynamics to SoftBank,
a famously deep-pocketed tech investor, in 2017 as
part of a broader attempt to shed business units
with weaker prospects for near-term profitability.
The price wasn’t disclosed at the time, but twopeople familiar with the matter say SoftBank paid
about $165 million.
Because of the potential military applications,
the sale needed approval from Cfius. The agency
stipulated that executives at the Japanese con-
glomerate couldn’t hire or fire management, direct
the product road map, or have access to Boston
Dynamics’s intellectual property, according to peo-
ple familiar with the matter.
By then the machines had started to seep into
popular culture. The company’s latest robotic dog
model, Spot, has become a YouTube sensation. In
one 2018 clip with more than 60 million views, one
of the yellow, four-legged machines is thwarted by
the knob as it tries to open a door. Another ver-
sion of Spot, this one equipped with a mechanical
hand, turns the handle, and the pair pass through.
Although the robots trot along amiably enough in
the video, many viewers likened it to a scene from
Jurassic Park in which velociraptors learn to open
doors, to terrifying effect.
Since joining SoftBank, Boston Dynamics has tri-
pled its staff, to 300 people, and moved into new
headquarters at a cost of $20 million, according to
a person familiar with the matter.
Paying for the robot company’s operations
cost SoftBank upwards of $150 million annually,
one person familiar with the matter says. Late last
year, SoftBank made a new push to steer Boston
Dynamics toward profitability, accelerating an effort
that had started under Google. Playter describes
the changes as a logical development after years
of internally funded R&D under Google. “Since
the SoftBank acquisition and with the maturation
of the Spot robot, the company has resumed com-
mercialization of our technologies,” he says. The
billion-dollar price tag would be justified largely by
progress on applications like these.
In October the company played host to 800 vir-
tual attendees at its first customer and developer
conference. Videos showed Spot conducting dan-
gerous power plant inspections of pipes, moni-
toring a thermal exhaust treatment facility, and
taking temperatures of Covid-infected patients at
a Boston hospital.
Some of these things are already happen-
ing. The company has sold about 400 of the
machines, which start at $75,000 each, bringing in
at least $22 million in revenue. Architectural giant
Foster + Partners is testing out a Spot robot topped
with a scanner to track progress at building sites.
The robot is safer than the drones the company has
tried for the same tasks, has longer battery life, and
elicits more favorable reactions from human staff-
ers, according to Foster partner Adam Davis.“Could
those robots
do something
we haven’t
thought
of yet?”○ Spot’stasksinclude
site inspection and
taking temperatures of
Covid-infected patients