What’s worse than a robot dog that can open doors? How about a robot dog that opens doors and that can’t be stopped?
Boston Dynamics’ latest terrifying video shows an employee trying to stop its SpotMini robot dog from opening a door.
Needless to say the employee fails, miserably.
While it might be innocently titled “Testing Robustness”, don’t let that fool you.
This is a human with a hockey stick trying, quite violently, to stop a robot from getting past it. Even physically holding the door fails with the employee eventually resorting to a rope attached to the back of the robot.
While he manages to pull the robot back you can see just how much the robot is fighting against the rope, relentlessly moving towards its goal.
The end result? The dog manages to open the door, obviously.
This is the second in the SpotMini series of tests with the first successfully showing that Spot could approach a door and, using a newly attached claw, could turn the handle on a door and open it.
Considering that video prompted this reaction, it’s hard to imagine how this latest test will make us feel any more relaxed.
Since its merging and then departure from Google its not always been clear what Boston Dynamics’ overall purpose has been, other than to try and further the abilities of robots.
What we do know however is that they can now successfully create robots that can see the world around them, recognise obstacles and then as long as they’ve got the tools, overcome those obstacles.