Cosmo and Spot do not get along.
You may recognize one of the dogs in this picture: we’re pretty sure it’s Andy Rubin’s dog, Cosmo. Cosmo not only “contributes to most big decisions at Playground” but also serves as its head of security. Andy Rubin is the co-founder of Android, and for about a year, he managed the robotics program at Google (now known as Alphabet). More recently, he’s been running a hardware incubator called Playground, which has enough clout to summon up another robotic dog with Google ties: Boston Dynamics’ Spot.
The video was posted by Steve Jurvetson, a partner at VC firm DFJ. “I was told that this is the only Spot (their latest robot) in civilian hands,” Jurvetson told IEEE Spectrum. (Arguably, the new ATLAS is Boston Dynamics’ latest robot.) Jurvetson was really impressed by the robot’s “lifelike movement.” He added: “And the tradition of the uncanny valley continues . . . To the un-canine valley!”
As for Spot, we know that the U.S. Marines were using it as a recon robot late last year but the future of that program is unclear.
I don’t know how anyone would not be interested in Spot. Here’s another video from Jurvetson; it’s a lot of fun to see the robot just being played with in a completely unstructured way: