The company that used to play tricks is now making money!

For decades, Boston Dynamics has presented a dazzling image to the world - as a company known for its robot stunts, from "Big Dog" that can walk on snow to "Atlas" that can do difficult movements. But recently, the company has faced one of its biggest challenges to date: commercialization. At the just-held Promat, Boston Dynamics released its second fully commercialized product, Stretch. Boston Dynamics has not focused on commercial marketing for a long time, and when they really started commercial development, SoftBank is undoubtedly the biggest promoter.

Boston Dynamics was originally spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before that, it was more of a research company than a commercial company. In 2013, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google. Four years later, SoftBank took over Boston Dynamics from Google under undisclosed terms. Facing such a huge global robot market, Boston Dynamics, which has various technologies in hand, also plans to commercialize its products, and has successively launched the wheeled robot Handle, the quadruped robot Spot, and the protagonist of this article, Stretch.

It's easy to make a robot strong enough to shoot a video, but it's another thing to make it perform tens of thousands of tasks and work around the clock. Stretch is Boston Dynamics' second truly commercial robot, designed specifically for the handling needs of warehouse customers. This project has the same design genes as Spot and the humanoid robot Atlas, but the system is designed to complete one task: moving goods in warehouses. Its direct ancestor is Handle, Boston Dynamics' first attempt at a robot to perform this task.

According to Kevin Blankespoor, general manager of Boston Dynamics' warehouse robotics group, with the precedent of the Atlas humanoid robot, they found it an attractive match to spin off a large part of the Atlas team to make the two-wheeled robot Handle to handle boxes in the warehouse. After doing some experiments with customers using Handle, Boston Dynamics used these experiences on Stretch, but the inspiration all started with Atlas, and many of the hardware tidbits of Atlas and Spot are on Stretch.

Stretch is a mobile robot with a handle on its back to control its movement. When the robot reaches the work area, it can perform tasks such as automatic handling. Stretch's arm can withstand a weight of 50 pounds and is suitable for unloading goods from vans and putting goods on shelves in logistics warehouses.

Repeatability must be one of the biggest issues in entering the commercial field. Kevin Blankespoor said: "Stretch has enough hardware reliability and software robustness so that it can handle all the surprises you get - this is an order of magnitude increase in workload. That's what we did with Stretch. Stretch will never be a highlight, but Stretch works." In the future, increasing market penetration and working with existing products are the core of the work of Boston Dynamics Warehouse Robotics Group.

Another robot planned for commercial use, Spot, is a quadruped robot. Currently, Spot has begun commercial trials with partners. BP, a British oil company, is trying to use Spot to keep workers away from potentially dangerous working environments to improve employee safety. "There are thousands of pounds of pressurized flammable materials out there," Ballard said. "High-pressure oil and gas poses risks to people working in close proximity. If we can have a robot with the appropriate sensors , we prefer to do that."

The outside world speculates that Boston Dynamics's move into the sea is related to the company's financial situation. In the past 10 years, Boston Dynamics has experienced three changes of ownership, and this speculation is not without reason. For many years, Boston Dynamics has been committed to researching new robot products, and its R&D investment is imaginable. In addition, the robot market has grown at an extremely fast rate in recent years. As a technologically advanced robot company, it is reasonable to choose to commercialize its products. After the three products Handle, Stretch and Spot have been polished in the commercial market for a period of time, Boston Dynamics can obtain enough data to invest in the research and development of the next product, and after commercialization, the company will have more income for research and development. For a technology company, it is also a way to kill two birds with one stone.