Alfred Rizzi, chief technology officer of the Robotics and AI Institute, discusses robot capability and long-term research at a Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute seminar in Pittsburgh.
Rizzi compares robots with animals and children that cross difficult terrain, arguing that their balance and movement remain far beyond current machines. He looks back at Boston Dynamics projects including LittleDog, Sand Flea, WildCat, and Spot, and describes how Spot’s smaller, quieter design changed the team’s approach.
Rizzi says the Robotics and AI Institute was established to pursue long-range robotics research separately from product sales. Its goal is to connect academic freedom with experienced teams, systems engineering, and the resources to build and test integrated machines. He describes a staff of about 274, roughly 16,000 square feet of lab space, robots across several platforms, and about 350 GPUs.
Rizzi divides robot intelligence into cognitive ability and physical capability, including designs that handle contact safely. The Watch, Understand, Do project aims to teach robots tasks by observing people, such as placing objects or eventually repairing bicycles. Another project uses an actuated bicycle to explore balancing, jumping, and reinforcement learning, including policies trained in simulation and transferred to hardware.
The institute is studying dexterous mobile manipulation and humanoid control, including reinforcement learning for faster Spot running and difficult whole-body movements. Rizzi says safety and trust remain unresolved challenges, and that data-driven policies can be difficult to debug when they fail. He also argues that sensing should be designed together with the behavior it guides, and that manipulation is proving harder than expected.
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