Michael Reeves Made a Boston Dynamics Spot Robot Dog Pee Beer

Michael Reeves, YouTube’s most ridiculous maker, made a Spot robot pee beer in his most recent video.

Boston Dynamics is a company that makes extremely high-tech robots, which you have probably seen in some of their viral videos. They’ve built many quadrupedal and bipedal robots over the years that have an uncanny ability to walk, run, jump, and recover from human attempts to knock them over. Boston Dynamics has received a great deal of funding from the government and many of their robots have been developed with military applications in mind. But they have also recognized that their technology has a place in civilian industries, which is what the Spot robot dog is intended for. Michael Reeves, YouTube’s most ridiculous maker, made a Spot robot pee beer in his most recent video.

The Spot robot dog is pretty amazing to see in action. It has robust hardware and extremely sophisticated control algorithms that let it walk around in a frighteningly natural manner, almost like a real dog. It is built for actual work, like performing inspections in hazardous industrial facilities. But it is also cool and very adorable, which is why Reeves wanted to get his hands on one. According to the video’s narrative, Reeves spent a lot of time trying to get a Spot robot from Boston Dynamics, but the company was hesitant to accommodate his requests, because they want the robot to be taken seriously. It is an expensive robot, and understandably, they don’t want it to be seen as a toy. But they eventually relented and Reeves was able to get his very own Spot (yes, we are jealous).

As Reeves excitedly explains, Spot is an extremely advanced robot. But Reeves is a crazy person and he needed an appropriately insane purpose for his Spot. He settled on making the robot “pee” beer into any red Solo cups that happen to be sitting on the ground. His Spot is equipped with a pressurized bladder filled with beer, which is dispensed through a device mounted on a pair of servos like a gimbal. A Raspberry Pi runs a computer vision algorithm that detects the center of the cup by looking for the brightest pixels in a video feed and averaging their locations. But for that to work, the Spot robot first has to find the general locations of Solo cups on the floor. That required an additional security camera to send a video feed wirelessly to Reeve’s computer, which runs a TensorFlowmachine learning model to detect cups. When it does, it tells the robot to walk over and stand on top of the cup. From there, the dispenser goes into action and cups are filled with hoppy goodness. It’s a completely absurd use of expensive technology, but we would expect nothing less from Michael Reeves.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist.
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