If you have not yet seen a Boston Dynamics viral video showcasing the company’s incredible robots, check out their YouTube channel for a sense of the treat the sixth grade students at the Kickemuit Middle School enjoyed last Tuesday, Nov. 2. That was the afternoon that Crystal Kemp, an electrical engineer and technician, brought Spot to school.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) teacher Kerri Krawczyk is always looking for interesting opportunities for her students, and an audience with Spot is something for which she had long hoped.

“This school has great focus on STEM,” she said. “So when they get to high school they’ve had exposure.”

“The kids have been working on engineering design, and we’ve had different guest speakers to show them what you can do with it in real life,” said Krawczyk. “Then one day one of my students said that her mom works at Boston Dynamics and I said, ‘What?! The Boston Dynamics I have been emailing for years?’”

“They get a lot of requests — we got lucky!” she said.

Boston Dynamics is an engineering and design company that was founded in 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since their inception, they’ve created a number of mobile robots designed to perform a wide variety of tasks, but it is Spot that was the first to move to market, becoming commercially available in 2019 for a base price of $75,000.

Spot’s not a dog (though it moves like one). It is a mobile robot — a highly agile one — that navigates a wide range of rough terrain under adverse conditions, allowing for the automation of routine inspection tasks and data capture safely, accurately, and frequently.

Crystal Kemp, the KMS student's mother, not only works for Boston Dynamics, she’s a key part of the engineering team that keeps the company producing and innovating robots. Kemp used to work as a welder and fabricator for a Warren company that was creating components for Boston Dynamics, until the tech giant bought the local company, and Kemp’s services, in 2015. Since then, Kemp’s area of expertise has expanded, and she was taught to diagnose problems and build battery packs for the company’s line of robots.

“There’s a lot of process and testing, a lot that can go wrong,” said Kemp. Atlas, for example — the hydraulic humanoid parkour star of Boston Dynamics videos, takes a lot of work, trial and error, to keep him on his feet. If Spot is $75,000, how much would Atlas cost, one student wondered.

“Atlas is a research and development platform,” Kemp said. “He’s unreliable and expensive. Anyone who bought Atlas would need their own team of engineers to keep it running.”

Other questions posed by the students included:

How does he go up and down? How will robots advance? Do you use robots to make other robots? How long does it take to build?

The questions led to a very important point about robotics — as fun as Spot, Atlas, and the others are to watch, without a practical application, don’t expect something like that to see production.

“There needs to be a customer, a need for what it can do,” said Kemp. “You can make a robot for anything, but if it does not solve a particular need, it won’t be built.”

In that spirit, the Boston Dynamics robots most likely to go into production at some point in the future include
Handle, a research robot with two flexible legs on wheels and two "hands" for manipulating objects; Stretch, a robot designed for warehouse automation; and Pick, a robot like Stretch that is designed to carry boxes.

After admitting she was not an expert Spot-handler, Kemp did an admirable job running the robot through its repertoire of tricks before sending it sashaying out the door on its way to a meeting with the Mt. Hope High School Robotics Club.