BOSTON DYNAMICS' ROBOT DOG WILL BE AVAILABLE NEXT YEAR

It’s been a hell of a two days for Boston Dynamics’ fantastical quadruped robot SpotMini. Yesterday, it starred in a new video that may seem, well, a bit ho-hum at first glance—at least compared to the company’s other recent reveals. The robot doesn’t open doors for its friends or fight off a human assailant brandishing a hockey stick. It simply traipses down corridors, through doorways, and up a staircase. Yet within that short journey lies a tantalizing detail about SpotMini the robot dog.

Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert followed that up today at the TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics conference at UC Berkeley with surprising news for the secretive company: SpotMini is coming to market, and soon. The company is planning to build 100 units later this year.

“That's the prelude to getting them into a higher rate production,” Raibert said on stage, “which we hope to start about the middle of next year.” He declined to disclose the price, but did say the machine in the most recent video is about 10 times cheaper to produce than a previous iteration. “And we think we can go further,” Raibert said.

Boston Dynamics has long been research-focused, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been thinking about what consumers want out of SpotMini. For one, buyers will be able to mount their own hardware on SpotMini’s back, Raibert said. Boston Dynamics is also working on its own add-on packages. “For instance, we have a surveillance package where we have special cameras that can mount on the back,” he said. And that famous arm that helped the robot open the door for its friend? That’s an extra option that’ll be removable.