Adam Savage’s Tested
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2024
28:18 · 3.2M views · Feb 13, 2020
Adam Savage builds a Victorian-style rickshaw carriage for Boston Dynamics' Spot robot to pull, with him riding as passenger. The video covers the build and the engineering problems of pairing cutting-edge robotics with vintage transport, such as tuning the payload through Spot's API.
HN commenters cite it as a fun real-world example of Spot hauling a passenger whenever Boston Dynamics robots come up.
3 comments from Hacker News
I believe so; see [LINK] for the choreography API. You don't even have to buy a Spot to write the code, which is impressive in this industry! Now we just need someone to buy one and set it up in front of a webcam with a public SSH login. There's more documentation at [LINK] and [LINK] . However, it looks like a lot of the choreography is built-in; you can call twerk() or butt_circle() (documented at [LINK] ) but you don't have access to the raw kinematics, gyros, and accelerometers to generate your own unique moves. It would be amazing if they'd release the full routine to cause your Atlas or Spot to perform the dances, but I'm not aware of that being public anywhere. For a more general example, check out this video where Adam Savage used a Spot to pull a rickshaw; his programmer was able to work with the API to change the payload tuning of the robot: this video It appears that the API is more about what you'd need to make Spot useful in an industrial or demonstration context than to build your own Spot. They want something that a generalist can make do useful stuff out-of-the-box, which makes sense.
Agreed. On the other hand, it'd be highly amusing if the future did involve humanoid robots out mowing the grass with a push mower, or getting into their car to drive to the grocery store. I'm reminded of this Adam Savage video of BD's Spot pulling a rickshaw (23:00). this video Maybe in the future the passenger will be a humanoid robot being taken to its laundry folding job?
As others have said you can't directly ride it (the max payload is too low), but Adam Savage did manage to hook it up to a rickshaw and ride it that way: this video