Spot, the famed robot dog from Boston Dynamics is getting a OpenAI ChatGPT treatment.
Boston Dynamics, the American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is known for various highly-mobile robots. And Spot, the dog, has been made commercially available since 2019, making it the first commercially available robot from the company.
Spot was first revealed three years earlier, in 2016, and takes the form of a four-legged canine that weighs 25 kg.
In November 2017, a promotional video of Spot using its forward claw to open a door for another robot to enter gained fame on YouTube.
At that time, the video received mixed reactions, with many people saying perceiving the robot as "creepy" and "reminiscent of all kinds of sci-fi robots that wouldn't give up in their missions to seek and destroy."
This time, things escalated to a whole different level, thanks to ChatGPT.
We integrated ChatGPT with our robots.
We had a ton of fun building this!
Read on for the details: pic.twitter.com/DRC2AOF0eU— Santiago (@svpino) April 25, 2023
The team of programmers at Boston Dynamics have equipped the robot dog with OpenAI's ChatGPT, so it can respond to users' queries and understand what it's told.
After that, the team also embedded Google's Text-to-Speech voice modulation to allow it to verbally respond to answers and commands.
This way, Boston Dynamics essentially gave spot its own voice, and providing users a new way for interactions.
In a video posted to Twitter, machine learning engineer Santiago Valdarrama showcased how he and his colleague programmed a Spot robot dog to verbally answer system questions with the help of OpenAI's popular tool.
"These robots run automated missions every day," Valdarrama explained in his Twitter thread, noting that each mission includes "miles-long, hard-to-understand configuration files" that only engineers can understand.
"That's where ChatGPT comes in," he continued.
"We show it the configuration files and the mission results. We then ask questions using that context. Put that together with a voice-enabled interface, and we have an awesome way to query our data!"
That's where ChatGPT comes in.
We show it the configuration files and the mission results. We then ask questions using that context.
Put that together with a voice-enabled interface, and we have an awesome way to query our data!— Santiago (@svpino) April 25, 2023
In a video posted by Valdarrama, Spot can be seen answering questions about its battery level, mission details, and more.
And more, Spot can even indicate a yes-no answer by nodding or shaking its head.
According to Valdarrama, the robot dogs run automated tasks every day, and each task uses a long and difficult-to-understand configuration file that only a technician can understand. Additionally, after each mission, the robot dog collects a lot of data, but there’s no easy way to query all that data at any time.
Using ChatGPT, Valdarrama and his team want to make it easier for users to understand the configuration files and query the data.
Giving Spot its own way to respond verbally is useful, a lot of people who've seen the video posted by Valdarrama are literally freaked out by it.
We can now ask the robots about past and future missions and get an answer in real-time. ChatGPT interprets the question, parses the files, and formulates the answer.
Massive upgrade!@Levatas team, you guys rock!
Stay tuned because more is coming!— Santiago (@svpino) April 25, 2023
While Spot-ChatGPT configuration does feel like it's bringing science-fiction to reality. It marks yet another step closer towards the robot uprising, which conjures up images of a dystopian future where robots have turned against their own creators.
But integrating the chatbot into robots has always been a part of the overall plan.
Since AI products have made their ways into computers, smartphones, and IoT devices, it was only a matter of time before AIs are making their way into the robotics field, where the technology is given legs and arms for mobility.
ChatGPT has been making headlines since its release, and has since been used to generate anything between business ideas, to writing recommendation letters and making poems.
Many developers around the world have also been testing the power of this AI chatbot in different ways. In fact, not long before this, the world's "most-advanced humanoid" has also been given ChatGPT.
Due to the technology's abilities and hype, it's obvious that the team at Boston Dynamics also considered using ChatGPT in this experiment.
"We believe that our work is just the start of a shift in how we develop robotics systems," the company's announcement reads, "and we hope to inspire other researchers to jump into this exciting field."