How does Boston Dynamics use AI? – Towards Data Science

Being a company funded partially by DARPA, it is very hard to find information about them. However, let's try to find out how they use technology to build their awesome robots. If someone from Boston Dynamics can correct my mistakes, I'd appreciate it. Eric Jang, Research Engineer at Google Brain, said "The value of Boston Dynamic is almost entirely in their closed-source control software. Boston Dynamics doesn't publish what techniques they use, but from Marc Raibert's talk at NIPS, it seems like their work is based on the approach proposed by "Sequential Composition of Dynamically Dexterous Robot Behaviors" by Burridge, Rizzi, and Koditscheck in 1999 (https://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/up...). The robotic policy uses a model-based controller, which is in turn represented as a sequential composition of "cost funnels" that operate over local regions of state space."