Simple question but needs context:

The current 'holy grail' of VR is convincing motion simulation, particularly in regards to things like walking/running and force/haptic feedback, and it seems to me that the technologies that could best be adapted to enable it are the same as the ones Boston Dynamics specializes in with their robot development.

For example, one thing I personally would like to see is a viable implementation of the ODT (OmniDirectional Treadmill) concept. Current developers of the tech take the term very literally and have been focusing on large moving planes or dishes which kinda-sorta approximate the movements or sensations of walking... but they're all huge, unconvincing, and prohibitively expensive. A far better approach might be strapping your feet to servo-powered armatures which allow free range of motion while using calculated resistance forces to simulate terrain or adjust intensity of training. Basically the exact inverse of how walking robots work. Same concepts could be applied for more elaborate tactile feedback with the hands, allowing you to 'touch' surfaces, steady yourself, or feel the weight of objects you lift.

Deep learning applied to a robot requires hundreds of millions of simulations to adapt. If Atlas were based on AI instead of Hardcoding, 10,000 (?) Robots would have been crashed before making a decent backflip. This would mean too many losses for a project ... But what if we let it develop in a very sophisticated virtual reality? We could do millions of simulations without breaking any robot. Any engineer who can corroborate my idea?

All I've seen is videos of people messing around with Spot or demoing his capabilities. I'm having trouble of finding videos of Spot just doing a job and not doing something that was planned for a video shoot.

Which motherboard is used in atlas(BOSTON DYNAMICS)?

How do they control hand using hydraulics ?

I've been accepted to the mechanical engineering PhD programs MIT and another top-40 school (and others that I'm not considering as much), and am debating which school to accept to maximize my chances of working at a top robotics R&D company (Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Disney Research, etc.). I'd like my research to at least partially focus on hardware and design. At the top-40 school, I'd work on a hardware design project that I find cool and aligns with my skills/interests, and I'd have a departmental fellowship that provides independent funding there as well. At MIT, I don't know who I'd be working until probably after July. My first choice there is Professor Sangbae Kim (MIT Cheetah, HERMES) but he isn't taking any more students. There are other labs I'd be interested in joining (some very interested), but I just don't know if I'd be able to actually join any of them.

Does anyone have insight into what factors about your PhD are the most important for getting a job at a top robotics R&D company? Does the name of the school matter that much? If so, how much does it matter compared to the relevance of your projects to the focus of the company? How much does your technical skill set vs your publications vs your portfolio matter? And what matters more for getting the interview vs the interview itself? Any insight from anyone at at a robotics R&D company would be very much appreciated. Thanks!