I know BD is not faking at all.
First, I saw personally one of the robots working.
Second, my personal budget is waaaaay below BD, million times lower, and even so I was able to build a self standing and driving two wheels and one arm robot, with accelerators and gyros chips, infrared and ultrasound sensors for obstacles, no image camera yet (working on it), and a simple space orientation beacon based on 3 ultrasound emitters in the long room. When he wants to make sure about location, it stops, shuts off its own ultrasound obstacle avoidance, blinks its strong IR LEd upwards in a certain sequence of pulses, this trigger the 3 emitters, then listen to them. The first emitter beeps, the second hear such beep and issue its own beep, the third does it too. The robot listen for the 3 beeps and measures time between them following its own IR flash. As the time delay between each emitter is known, the robot calculates the delays from what he hear, and with certain accuracy he can tell where he is in the room, walks a foot and repeat, now he even knows the direction. This was home made (as many others in the world), using 8 simple AVR AtMega microcontrollers (including the emitters) a half size car battery, MosFET drivers, motors, etc. Boston D uses much more advanced processors, memories, programming, drivers, actuators, engines, and millions of dollars. If they can? Of course they can, much more even, talk about the military contracts we shouldn't know.