After listening to early adopters, Boston Dynamics gave its robot dog a hardware boost and extended WiFi capabilities. It can be controlled remotely using the company's new web browser-based interface, Scout. It's the first Boston Dynamics device equipped with self-charging capabilities and a dock, which means it can be deployed for longer-term missions "with little to no human interaction," Boston Dynamics said. The previous version of Spot had around 90 minutes of battery life before requiring a manual charge.

CHIP's highest-level goals were programmed C and runs on board. The RAP system is designed to deal with achieving goals in a dynamic environment. Each RAP task description encodes a set of methods for carrying out the task in different situations, a success check to tell when the task has accomplished its purpose, and notations that describe when things are not going as expected. At run time, a RAP task examines its methods and selects one that is appropriate in the current situation. By doing method selection at run time, RAPs are more likely to select the best method, even if the world is changing or contains details that cannot be predicted in advance.

Robots that can be physically reconfigured to do lots of different things are, in theory, a great way to maximize versatility while saving time and effort. Okay, yeah, that may not sound super exciting, but it means you can teach a dodecapod robot to transition into a septapod robot that can carry stuff with two arms while using a third to point a camera. Programmed in advance, that is, which is fine, except that as robots get more modular and easier to physically reconfigure, it becomes more and more useful to have a generalized system that can dynamically generate gaits (and transitions between gaits) on the fly no matter what the leg configuration of your robot happens to be. The researchers are planning on extending their method to include dynamic gaits, which means things like (we hope) running and jumping, and they're also going to generalize to other morphologies like bipeds and tripeds.