During the Presentation at the end of Phase One an area that got asked about was when I was talking about Boston Dynamics and how they are actually used in modern Society and how the company actually makes money as that wasn't thoroughly covered in the presentation.
Dangers of a Mortal Body:
So to do this I looked more into Boston Dynamics, and found that they had recently published a video explaining the exact things I had questions about.
In this video Boston Dynamics elaborate how their robots are used in lots of different industries, one of which is National Grid, and in this example the reason it is so important to use this robot is the danger that is correlated to the task: To do a close inspection of the equipment used at National Grid it comes with harsh dangers so it is safer for a robot to do it rather than a person that could have a fatal amount of electricity harm them if something goes wrong. As well as this the inspection robot was equipped with both a high-resolution 30X optical zoom pan/tilt/zoom camera and an infrared (IR) thermal camera to detect signs of potential problems. This means they don't always need to get close to the actual piece of technology that is required to be checked since the IR camera can instantly see if it is regulating at the correct temperature making the job quicker than a human manual inspection of it.
Lack of Manpower:
It isn't always a down to safety that the spot robot is used in the industry this reason is elaborated in a recent video by Tom Scott - a content creator who documents interesting things in the world and shares them with his viewers.
In this video he looks into Boston Dynamic's robots and how they have 'real-world use'
In the facility he is looking into it is run remotely and the control station for it is half an hour away, and it also controls twenty other hydro plants, this means realistically they don't need people in the facility for it to run. but they do need to check to make sure everything is running okay and the water pressure isn't to much for the dam to run correctly.
This is where the spot comes in handy, this robot can inspect all the equipment to make sure it is all ok, but the best thing is it can be operated via remote control from a distant location. this mean that instead of someone having to journey out half an hour up a mountain to the facility it can be operated and checked from a different facility altogether. The best thing about this is that it means that you don't need twenty different engineers that can check each station you can have a handful of engineers remotely controlling different spots or analysing the date they collect making sure that nothing is going wrong.
Lastly the Spot robot is one of the only remotely controlled robots that can do this purely because of the research that has been done to get the spot to this point. All the testing of human like motion means that the robots of Boston Dynamics can manoeuvre a human infrastructure with no hassle at all. So it seems all the research into flipping robots have paid off for Boston Dynamics.
What to take away from this:
The two different ways that I have documented here show in detail how robots can be used for good in the the modern world and I really like this concept of robots being used for good and more important practicality. I do think two very interesting schools of thought are used in the ideas of robots here.
Robots are more disposable than humans
Robots can take jobs away from people (not only in a factory sense but one engineer with a handful of robots is doing what used to take groups of engineers to do just because of robots 'making things easier')
these could be interesting themes to carry forward into the future of my projects.