3 ms·
Humanoids, in particular, have a lot of moving parts. The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom. The hand has something like 21. Legs, 7. Feet, somewhere between 3
by GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Humanoids, in particular, have a lot of moving parts. The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom. The hand has something like 21. Legs, 7. Feet, somewhere between 3 and six. That's a lot of motors, gears, motor controller boards, joint angle sensors, force-torque sensors, etc. Humans have ubiquitous sensing. Tactile sensing of up to 1000 sensors per square inch of skin. Force sensing at every joint. High bandwidth, highly efficient actuators (muscles).
Humanoids are just extremely complicated systems with a lot of moving parts that require very high reliability, along with a metric ton of sensors and the wiring harness needed to support all of it.
For reference, a standard brushless DC motor that is reliable enough, strong enough, and precise enough for use in a robot will retail for around $1000. Just for the motor. And you need at least 30 of them, probably more.
- Pharmakon 8y agoNot to mention that humans run on food, produce little waste heat, are portable, and regenerate many tissues as needed for decades until we enter EOL.
- rasz 8y agoits 100% in R&D. Real commodity hardware is sold at ~3x raw material cost, with R&D amortized over millions of units and very long period. Every time you see something made in china and go "how the hell can this be so cheap" is seeing real commodity price, with no R&D and middleman margins. People will argue about quality, by writing replies on keyboards that cost $5 to make in China, and clicking send with $0.2 BoYue microswitch in their $70(retail) mouse. You could in theory make 500K robots at 5K if you give up any notion of recouping development cost by tackling ridiculous margins, and instead concentrate on moving millions of units.
- grogenaut 8y agoWhy aren't cars $5k then? Heck most basic motorcycles are $7k plus and they're well understood and very simple.
- rasz 8y agoCherry QQ (chevy spark copy) is ~$5K in china, being a ripoff removed R&D cost.
- grogenaut 8y agoGreat you literally cherry picked the lowest possible example for your argument. So after 100 years of development and ip theft yes the least featured model might be at that price level. I concede the argument. I look forward to getting my cheap robot in 100 years on the libertarian colony of vega
- rasz 8y agoCheapest "cars" in China start under $1K, Cherry QQ is actually decent in comparison. Want different example? How about micro controllers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rixo78hv_lw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rixo78hv_lw 3 cent in Asia, cheapest US based manufacturer offerings start at 30 cent.
- cbames89 8y agoAs a data point. The original Valkyrie cost ~12.5 million. Thats hardware and software dev over about 3 years. I'm not positive about the subsequent copies, but I've heard they're in million to 2 million.