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Alphabet Shakes Up Its Robotics Division
- drcode 11y agoI have to say I'm kind of baffled about all these companies complaining "Regulation is hurting self driving cars!" and "Regulation is hurting drone delivery!" when there are pretty much zero barriers to enter the consumer robotics market for a machine that dusts your house, does your laundry, does your dishes, picks up clutter from the floor, etc. (And yes I realize these tasks involve surprisingly hard AI problems, but why isn't Google already running pilots where they give people special washing machines, laundry machines, robot-friendly book shelves, etc etc that help mitigate the hard AI aspects of the problem?)
- bliti 11y agoSimple: they lack leadership. A proper leader would focus on setting the framework for autonomous machines to operate. Without leadership, all they can do is showcase shiny greenfield projects.
- pj_mukh 11y agoThe same reason they haven't given everybody "pilot" autonomous cars. Expectations are huge now, everything must be perfect.
- mrfusion 11y agoI agree. What about a robot that simply move clothes from the washer to the dryer? That's a pretty well defined tasks and is basically 50% of the work of doing laundry.
- melling 11y agoSomeone else fold your close for you? Moving the clothes from the washer to dryer takes 15 seconds.
- tamana 11y agoYou have to be there to do it, which interrupts whatever you were doing at an annoyingly pecise time.
- melling 11y agoClothes can sit in the washer for hours. :-) I transfer when I'm walking by to go to the bathroom. Actually, with my AppleWatch, I usually unload dishwasher, washer/dryer when I'm told to stand up and move for a minute.
- mrfusion 11y agoI actually have a superpower where I can smell mildew when no one else can. So even 30 minutes of leaving the clothes wet is too much for me. It's interesting when I meet people I can smell who has left their clothes in the washer too long.
- mrfusion 11y agoI live out of the dryer :-(
- ghaff 11y agoAll-in-one units exist that just have a single front-loading tub. It seems they're designed primarily for where space is tight, so I suspect there are some tradeoffs. But as someone else said, that's probably the step associated with doing laundry that's the least effort. Putting clothes away is the biggest effort and good luck designing a robot to handle that.
- michaelt 11y agoIn 'serious academic' robotics, if you only have one hokuyo urg lidar [1] and one xsens mems imu [2] you're on a low budget project and you'll probably need a bunch more sensors before your product can operate reliably unattended. But you've already spent ten times the cost of an entry level roomba. The kind of butler robot we can make today [3] would seem extremely expensive for the functionality it could offer, making it hard get the sales needed to recoup your up front engineering costs - let alone to achieve the economies of scale needed to bring down the price on those sensors. [1] http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-urg-04lx-ug01-scanning-laser-rangefinder.html http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-urg-04lx-ug01-scanning-la... [2] http://www.newark.com/xsens/mti-20-2a5g4/mems-module-3d-motion-tracker/dp/94X2368 http://www.newark.com/xsens/mti-20-2a5g4/mems-module-3d-moti... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODGHw8uNnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODGHw8uNnY
- yincrash 11y agoI misread that as 'butter robot'. https://youtu.be/8d_hveJL4mU https://youtu.be/8d_hveJL4mU
- Tempest1981 11y agoThanks for the links; I love this stuff. I can see the laser rangefinder [1] being expensive. But what makes the xsens gyro/accelerometer [2] so expensive compared to a smartphone sensor, and why does a robot need that?
- sean-duffy 11y agoYeah that thing seems way overpriced, or at least far too high-spec for most applications. Quadcopter flight control boards containing gyros and accelerometers can be had for less than $20, and those do just fine.
- Animats 11y agoAccurate heading info requires good gyros and is moderately expensive. It's a lot cheaper than it used to be. When we did our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle ten years ago, we had about 3 degrees of heading noise, which kept the system which integrated LIDAR data into a terrain map from reliably mapping. The system had a MEMS gyro with too high a drift rate, and a magnetometer compass for long-term correction. But there were enough magnetic fields from the onboard equipment to mess up the magnetic compass. The software could detect trouble, and would stop, tilt the laser head to scan the terrain ahead and get a clean image, then advance. So the vehicle kept stopping to rescan. We looked into better heading gyros, but they cost about $20K at the time.
- icebraining 11y agoIf you need expensive sensors and other parts, the unit economics for domestic robots don't make sense; a single robot would cost too much for any single family to justify, compared to just hiring someone to do the laundry once or twice a week. A delivery drone, on the other hand, would be used all day by some business, so a large upfront investment makes sense.
- dominotw 11y agoI am reading this while my neato robot is disoriented trying to find its home base and is bumping into every wall on the way. I basically have zero confidence that we'll see something like what you are describing in next 2 decades atleast.
- Symmetry 11y agoReally regulation is critical for the success of self-driving cars. Nobody is going to want to buy self-driving cars if there are ones that get into lots of crashes so I think we're going to get into the same situation we have with the FAA where the big players all want the regulator to have real teeth. Consumer robotics doesn't have much of an entry barrier but as other have pointed out the components you need mean that prices are going to be in the $X0,000 range. That's too much for consumers but I think we're going to be seeing robots in warehouses soon.
- danblick 11y ago"Really regulation is critical for the success of self-driving cars. Nobody is going to want to buy self-driving cars if there are ones that get into lots of crashes..." If I were a car manufacturer and nobody wanted to buy my cars because they were seen as dangerous, I might try to make my cars safer to increase my sales, even if the law didn't require it.
- rhino369 11y agoThe problem is trust. The car being safe and being marketed as safe are different.
- jblow 11y agoYou might, but that costs money, and other market players are always invented to undercut you. Because the line of how much is too much is indistinct, someone is going to guess wrong before too long. This is even before you mix in perverse organizational incentives involving short-term view or individual profit vs long-term company health.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoComplaining about regulations holding you back is a great way to hide that your technology isn't actually there yet. It's marketing.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoCompanies always love to complain about too much regulation tho.
- atroyn 11y agoIt seems like every consumer and industrial robotics company, with the exception of the drone makers, tends to run into trouble sooner rather than later - and it turns out being a division of Google doesn't help that much. Rethink Robotics for example had a great start, but soon ran into cultural issues and weaker than expected sales. iRobot has been unable to escape the vacuum cleaner market. KUKA and the other really big industrial robot manufactures have started doing new things with sensor-enabled manipulators, but the customers haven't exactly flocked. What is it about robotics that seems to run these companies off the rails? I worry about Fetch robotics hitting a similar barrier, despite having a pretty clear business case.
- bsilvereagle 11y ago> iRobot has been unable to escape the vacuum cleaner market. In the consumer space. iRobot has a healthy relationship with the Defense Department. http://www.irobot.com/For-Defense-and-Security.aspx http://www.irobot.com/For-Defense-and-Security.aspx
- atroyn 11y agoThat's true. In fact, it seems like cosying up to DoD is the only way for a robotics company to really get anywhere or stay afloat in the long run. This shouldn't be true, yet seems to be. Why?
- melling 11y agoI'm just going to repost what I wrote 17 days ago: "Why are they against militarizing robots? It pays the bills. They could start with consumers or business but it's harder to build a market. This makes it harder to fund further development. Once the technology is developed by anyone for non-military use, transitioning to the military is easy. There's not some magic that prevents consumer developed technology from reaching the battlefield."
- chubot 11y agoIt pays, but with heavy constraints. You are subject to cycles in the military budget and to the government sales process. I highly doubt Google is interested in that revenue stream. Google doesn't just want to pay the bills -- and it doesn't need to. It wants to develop entirely new businesses that complement its existing ones, e.g. Nest. Also, it's bad for the brand. There are probably not many companies that sell both weapons and consumer goods...
- melling 11y agoI believe the idea in the new model is that each unit does need to pay the bills.
- rhino369 11y agoIt doesn't have to be that way. Alphabet can pump money into the robotic subsidiary forever. But it'll be more and more obvious how much of a drain it is when the robotics company is a black hole of profits.
- tboughen 11y agoWeapons and business goods at scale may be more viable - a la Boeing.
- Aleman360 11y ago> Why are they against militarizing robots? I get that their duty is to their shareholders, but you have to draw a line at some point. I wouldn't want to work on tools of violence.
- 11thEarlOfMar 11y agoPerhaps we are just impatient. Karl Benz invented the 'first automobile' in 1885 [0]. 29 years later, in 1914, Ford built the first mass-production factory for his autos. It initially produced 4 cars/hour, an annual rate of about 15,000. In 1915, there were 8,000 cars in all of the US. [1] I cannot find data, but let's guess that it's 10 more years before 1% of households in the US have cars. That would have meant about 500,000 cars. 1885 - 1925 is 40 years between invention of the first gas powered auto and 1% market penetration (bearing my assumption). Where was the robotics industry in 1976, 40 years ago? Moreover, the automobile solved one problem: Moving a human from point A to point B on a paved road. Many efforts are approaching robots as consumer products by trying to solve many very hard problems all at the same time. Perhaps robotic vacuums are the (only?) successful commercial robot because they solve a similarly discrete problem. It is understandable that we have not yet seen the type of commercial breakthroughs that we so highly anticipate. Give it another 20 years... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car#History [1] http://www.thejournal-news.net/opinion/commentary/here-s-looking-at-you-the-year-was/article_565162d6-99f9-11e4-8ff9-bf9e0d2432b5.html http://www.thejournal-news.net/opinion/commentary/here-s-loo...
- ghaff 11y agoThe other thing with vacuums is that for many people, especially those with kids and pets, vacuuming and sweeping is a pretty frequent task that usually takes more than a few minutes. Mowing lawns is the other obvious task that falls into this category and, indeed, robotic lawnmowers do seem to be coming onto the market.
- johansch 11y agoOne data point: "1974: The world's first microcomputer controlled electric industrial robot, IRB 6 from ASEA, was delivered to a small mechanical engineering company in southern Sweden" Here's a cute video showing this robot, still in use 40 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xNgQhLAPyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xNgQhLAPyI
- ghaff 11y agoThe pace of technology adoption has sped up but that's comparing electronics to, in many cases, large appliances so I'm not sure how relevant the comparison is. https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-speeding-up/ https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-s... is an interesting graph. Historically a lot of consumer tech took a long time to be adopted.
- lisper 11y agoThere's one very simple reason that general-purpose robots have failed to become economically viable: robots have to compete with humans, and humans are really cheap. I also think that not enough thought has been put into the question of: if we do manage to replace unskilled workers with robots, what do we do with all the people who are only capable of unskilled work? Not everyone has what it takes to become a coder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- ghaff 11y agoThat's basically the theme of The Second Machine Age. There are a lot of people around here who IMO are way too optimistic about the timelines for fully autonomous robocars. But if/when such a thing actually arrives, the effect on employment will be huge. Even if it may well still make sense to have a human present for, say, package delivery, the number of people whose job is primarily to be a driver is huge.
- kiloreux 11y agoI don't understand what you mean by humans are really cheap, you can't upgrade a human , you can't make him faster, you can't install latest update or add some components, the main disadvantage of robots nowadays is that we have not yet achieved a human level AI that gives us the abilitiy to replace humans by robots, but if we ever do that or even achieve just good advancement in it, I strongly doubt that any "unskilled" human worker would be better or compete on the job.
- zo1 11y agoWell, the cost of the capital outlay for reasearch and components, along with the ongoing maintenance costs for the robotic replacement should outweigh the cost of training, hiring and paying the human worker for the same job/task. That is what is meant by the "general purpose worker" as a human being cheaper than a robotic one. And is also why most robotic replacements, as far as I'm aware, have been very specialized and in extremely repetitive tasks that require minimal "visual cues".
- lisper 11y ago
- mtgx 11y agoWhat I want to know is if Alphabet is still trying to make robots for war. They promised only a year ago they wouldn't do that and wouldn't become a defense contractor, and then a month ago we found out they "failed" to sell their robots to the US Army. Good thing it was only Google that had to abide by the "don't be evil" mantra (more or less). Alphabet apparently could care less about it.
- Animats 11y agoThe article doesn't say much. Google has two humanoid robotics companies, Boston Dynamics (near Boston) and Schaft (near Tokyo). Schaft has better actuators and Boston Dynamics has better control. There's no indication that Alphabet has been able to integrate the technologies. That was the whole point of acquiring ten robotics companies. But if they can't be brought together, the acquisitions were pointless. None of the companies have significant revenue or sales, so running them as a conglomerate doesn't do anything. Alphabet is so secretive that no one can tell from the outside if they're doing something great or getting nowhere. Boston Dynamics stopped updating their web site after the Google acquisition. Schaft has no visible web presence at all. Raibert, Boston Dynamics' CEO, is 67, time to retire. Who replaces him?