By Evan Ackerman

Boston Dynamics is infuriatingly cool. They have to be the only robotics company out there that can just post a YouTube video of an incredibly agile autonomous quadruped named “Spot” with a four sentence description, and that’s that—no info on their site, no press release, no interviews. Because theyknow that everybody is going to watch it and think it’s awesome anyway. Grr.

Spot is a four-legged robot designed for indoor and outdoor operation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. Spot has a sensor head that helps it navigate and negotiate rough terrain. Spot weighs about 160 lbs.

We’ve pinged our contacts at Boston Dynamics for more details, but until we hear back from them (and now that they belong to Google, we’ll probably hear from them, like, never—UPDATE 02/11/15: Boston Dynamics got back to us, so, yeah, that was sooner than “never”), let’s see what we can figure out from the video. Again, none of this comes from Boston Dynamics—it’s just us talking about what looks new here.  …[Read more]