Not to be too blunt here, but: besides very impressive numbers of youtube views, what have those robots accomplished, in a “we have deployed X thousand of these in the following Y situations” sense, since 2006?
I’m (way more than) fine with blue sky work, and BD deserves credit for not building weapons, but at the same time there’s an impedance mismatch here.
If you're interested Adam Savage was allowed to use a 'Spot' robot for several months and shares some observations and information on actual usage on his youtube channel.
reading between the lines, as of Q4 last year they're still in _extremely_ early in any meaningful deployment. Lease-based alpha access to select customers, "hey we don't have to send a 12-man team out every month anymore", and carefully PRd information is certainly some kind of progress, but it's not anything like normal use.
Definitely not normal use, probably something akin to controlled alpha or beta testing. The only recent article a saw about the fall 2019 trials/leases was this article that didn't provide any meaningful details on usage.
I’m (way more than) fine with blue sky work, and BD deserves credit for not building weapons, but at the same time there’s an impedance mismatch here.