Boston Dynamics now sells a robot dog to the public, starting at $74,500

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  Meet Spot, the robodog. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]

Boston Dynamics, easily the world's leading robotics company, is selling a robot to the public for the first time in its 28-year history. The company's robotic quadruped, "Spot," is now for sale on shop.bostondynamics.com, where you can take home your very own robotic dog for a cool $74,500.

If you can't tell from the price, Spot is an industrial robot for industrial applications. Boston Dynamics' site calls Spot "a stable, dynamically balanced quadruped robot that can navigate through unstructured, unknown, or antagonistic terrain with ease." Spot is a platform, Boston Dynamics handles the locomotion, and it's your job to develop programs and attach extra equipment to make Spot useful. Out of the box, the robot is basically a highly mobile camera that can go up steps, tromp through the mud, and generally handle terrain better than nearly any other robot on Earth.

We covered Spot's development back when it was first unveiled in 2015. Back then, Spot—which has since been renamed to "Spot Classic"—was a 160-pound robodog with a pipe chassis and exposed internals. The big advancement at the time over previous Boston Dynamics quadrupeds was a design around an electric engine to drive the hydraulics system, which made it amenable to indoor use. Previous four-legged BD bots like the 330-pound Wildcat ran on a two-stroke gas engine that sounded like a chainsaw and constantly belched CO2. The Spot bots got a lot smaller with the "SpotMini" in 2016, a 55-pound robot that dumped the hydraulics system of the original Spot and went with an all-electric locomotion system. The SpotMini has since been renamed to plain old "Spot" and looks the closest to today's commercial bot—it even has an option for plastic cladding. This latest version, with a yellow shell, has been hanging around on the YouTube channel since 2017.

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