The AI Institute’s new Zurich head will focus on reliable, mobile robots. Evan Ackerman from IEEE Spectrum sits down with Marco Hutter to discuss new Zurich office.

When Marc Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, he wasn’t even sure it was going to be a robotics company. Now, Boston Dynamics is the authority in legged robots, and Raibert has turned his focus toward the long-term vision of what robotics can be.

It took a while before we got back to robotics. Sony was really the trigger—we’d worked for them quietly for about five years and made a running AIBO which never saw the light of day, and then we worked on their little humanoid QRIO, building tools that made it possible to do choreography.