A leading robotics company has revealed footage of a canine-inspired robot that can open doors that is certain to draw parallels to man’s worst nightmare, rather than his best friend.
Boston Dynamics on Monday revealed footage of its SpotMini robot, which has four legs, a trunk and long reaching claw for a head.
In the clip the yellow robot can be seen walking up to a lab door, turning the door handle with its front-facing claw and allowing a fellow robot to leave the room.
The US-based robotics company, formerly owned by Google and now Japan’s Softbank, posted the clip on YouTube but gave little else away.
However, it was quickly picked up on social media, with thousands sharing the “terrifying” clip overnight. It is a progression from the first version of SpotMini, which was seen in a clip on YouTube assisting with basic household chores and climbing stairs in 2017.
Just last year, the company’s chief executive revealed a “nightmare inducing” a 6ft 5in two-wheeler called Handle. A video clip published at the time showed Handle lifting up 100lbs crates and effortlessly jumping onto a 4ft platform. By November, it had graduated to backflips.
Boston Dynamics was spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was initially led by Andy Rubin, who created the Android operating system which is now operated by Google.
Despite garnering millions of views on YouTube, the company has struggled to produce marketable products and lost a military contract after one of its combat robots, dubbed Big Dog, was deemed too loud. Google parent Alphabet put the business up for sale in 2016. Softbank, an aggressive buyer of technology companies in the west, is believed to have parted with £78million in a deal that included the sale of Schaft, a bipedal robot company, which Google bought in 2013.
