Mark DiLeo, a “robot surgeon” on the Atlas repair team, answers questions about the playbook for fixing something that didn’t exist previously, the worst robot break he’s ever seen, and how people feel when watching robots fall. Read the interview below and watch a conversation with Mark on what makes a good robot surgeon.

Working at Boston Dynamics

What is your role at Boston Dynamics?
I’m the lead technician on the Atlas service and repair team. Bipedal robots like to fall down a lot. So whenever the robots fall down and break, it’s my team’s job to pick them up and fix them.

What’s a robot surgeon?
We like to consider ourselves robot surgeons because we’re basically doctors for the robots. For anything that goes wrong, we go in, diagnose, troubleshoot, repair, and we bring them back to life basically. Robotics is hard and we do a lot of difficult things here. We’re doing gymnastics, parkour, handstands, backflips — it’s a lot of stress on a robot, on mechanical parts. We push robustness and limits to show the world what we’re capable of.

The doctor is in

What makes a good robot surgeon?
Being able to adapt to new things, and being able to challenge yourself to fix things that have never been seen before.

What’s it like learning how to fix things that have ever existed before??
The Atlas repair team is definitely writing the book on how to repair these things. This is the only building that I’ve ever been in with humanoid robots, and robots in general. A team as skilled and capable as ours goes into a robot not knowing what’s broken, and within an hour or two we fix it, get it back up, and it’s doing backflips again. I pull all of my previous experience into it, like I’ve done a lot of automotive work. I’ve done welding, machining. My whole entire career has been mechanical work, mechanical design. So when I’m trying to fix something that’s never been made before, I use a lot of my background knowledge to do so.

What’s the worst break you’ve ever had to repair?
We’ve literally seen the robot fall down and completely split in half where the legs come off of torsos. Putting robots back together, even for something as severe as that, doesn’t take very long, though. The robot are designed to be manufactured and serviced pretty quickly.

How much easier is the production version of Atlas to repair than the prototype?
R1 was our research robot, it was never meant to be manufactured, it was never meant to be serviced. Every time it fell down, it was down for at least a day or two as we worked through problems and fixed it. I do miss R1 and some of the complicated repairs we got to do, but D1 (the production version of Atlas) was made for speed. It was made to be manufactured, it was made to be serviced in a customer environment, so it’s much easier to work on than R1 ever was.

Do you feel bad for the robots when they fall down and break?
I think we all feel bad for the robots when they fall down, especially when there’s a crowd of people watching demonstrations, and we all go, “Oooh!”

The path to robotics repair

What advice do you have for someone who wants to become a robot surgeon?
I have always wanted to do what I do. I have followed Boston Dynamics since I was in high school, and I’ve worked my entire career to be sitting where I am right now. I can remember when I was a little kid, 8, 9, 10 years old, I would be taking things apart in my basement. There’s a pretty famous photo of me, that’s me sitting in a high chair, taking apart a rotary phone with a screwdriver when I was 3 years old. So I have always been mechanically minded. 

I would definitely tell anybody that wants to get into this field to just start somewhere. Whether it’s go out, buy a motorcycle, start taking it apart, buy a car, start taking it apart. Even anything in your house, anything that’s broken, just try to fix it yourself and you’d be surprised at what you’re capable of.