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April 20, 2023, 1:51am
3
No, it’s quite knowingly. Bill gave them the ‘secret sauce’ in 1997.
I’ve had some preliminary contact with Marc Raibert, who runs BostonLegged Robots that Balance
I alluded to this in 2017:
As I understand it, Bill sent them the Little Man code and explanations of control. They didn’t reply, but their products got better.
A brief summary from Wikipedia: They developed BigDog for DARPA, and DI-Guy software for human simulation. The US Navy used DI-Guy to replace training videos for aircraft launch operations with simulations with DI-Guy characters. They transferred DI-Guy to VT MÄK (a company also in Cambridge, MA) just before being acquired by Google X. VT MÄK “develops and sells software for distributed simulations that system integrators, governments, and research institutions use to build and populate 3D simulated environments.” Last June, Google sold Boston Dynamics to a Japanese multinational, Softbank Group.
In that post, I had not located the corroboration from Bill. A search on “Boston Dynamics” fails apparently because the words are divided over two lines by a hard return. There was further discussion about the lack of response that might turn up in a search on “Boston” plus considerable patience to look through irrelevant results.
Rupert posted links to their patents in 2018: