Construction sites have been the inspiration for numerous technological advances. The construction site has been the driving force behind telematics, machine control, artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles. It apparently is now the “birthing place” for a new breed of robot dogs.
Robot dogs scare me. Maybe it’s because ever since I was a little boy, dogs scared me. Take a close look at this robot dog its maker; Boston Dynamics calls the “Spot Mini.”
Inverse.com reports that Boston Dynamics plans on making one thousand Spot Mini robot dogs a year by July 2019. So in the near future, there could be thousands of Spots with 3D vision, 17 distinct joints, and the ability to pick up and handle objects using its 5 degree-of-freedom arm and beefed up perception sensors.
It seems the plan is to start using them on more and more construction sites as the company grows the population of the robot dogs. These things will be creeping around job sites soaking in data and making people like me feel uncomfortable.
Boston Dynamics is a serious player that can accomplish this kind of high-end technology and its proliferation. It started as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. It worked for the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Then it was bought up by Google’s X division and eventually ended up being owned by the Japanese company Softbank Robotics.
I’m pretty sure in the future I can handle autonomous excavators and dozers running around a job site. But I don’t know if I’m ready for robot dogs. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies.
Do you think we might be getting carried away with technology on the job site?
Do we need more of a human touch?
Technology has helped improve the bottom line by increasing efficiency and productivity. Will bringing back human hands ruin that progress?
