Boston Dynamics, in case you haven’t been hanging out at your local robot bars and nightclubs, is a company that has been producing incredibly impressive yet somehow oddly unsettling robots, often in vaguely humanoid or animalistic forms. One of their robots, a canine-like machine called SpotMini, will be available for commercial sale later this year. More importantly, if you want to use these robots to tow trucks but aren’t sure how many you’ll need, Boston Dynamics has tested that, and has an answer for you.
The answer is ten, by the way. You’ll need to buy ten of these bonkers dogbots to tow a truck, specifically a medium-sized box truck, up a one degree slope, with the truck in neutral.
We don’t yet know the cost of the SpotMinis, but I’m guessing 10 of them will be more than finding a used tow truck on Craigslist, and the tow truck will likely be faster.
Then again, that tow truck can’t split up into ten parts which can bring you drinks or break down doors or love you or whatever these robots are supposed to do, so there’s that.