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What do you mean "Robots are hard to control at a low level"? That's the only level where they're easy! At the lowest granularity, they have servomotors, enco

What do you mean "Robots are hard to control at a low level"? That's the only level where they're easy! At the lowest granularity, they have servomotors, encoders/resolvers, and kinematics that convert motor rotation to a motion in 3D space. Robot manufacturers have made the code to make a joint or linear move to a predefined X/Y/Z/i/j/k location in space using those tools really quite simple. Inputs and outputs to control grippers and other end-of-arm tools are also straightforward. As long as you keep the process low-level, they're incredibly reliable and easy to program: a clever maintenance technician can pick up a pendant for the first time and have a well-scoped task programmed in a week. A competent sales engineer can clamp a small robot to a conference room table and demonstrate picking up and putting together your product in a one-hour sales demo. It's when you expand the scope when it gets really complicated: ask it to pick up a variety of objects, located by vision algorithms in arbitrary orientations and locations, that are moving in real time, in a changing environment, is simply a hard problem - and I think it always will be. Robots really only know how to move their tool center point from one location to another, and asking them to "do what I mean" and "pick up one of these and put it on one of those without making me worry about low-level stuff" is a level of simplification that has never really worked in any other domain.

GlenTheMachine 7y ago
It’s hard in two senses: one, it’s hard to translate low-level commanding into meaningful work in all but the most controlled of environments. That’s why robots that are economically viable today are nearly all on factory floors: that’s basically the only setting where you can control the environment well enough for them to be useful. And two, for “advanced” robots (quadrupeds/humanoids) it’s very hard to get them to even balance, much less walk. Yes, there are robots that do this today — surprisingly well, in fact. But there is a tremendous amount going on algorithmically under the hood to make it happen. Figuring out how to make them work took decades of research in controls. This is largely a restatement of what you said above, so I suppose it depends on what you mean by “low level”. My intent above was low level in horse terms, which includes standing and walking. Things humans think of as atomic behaviors.

GlenTheMachine 7y ago

It’s hard in two senses: one, it’s hard to translate low-level commanding into meaningful work in all but the most controlled of environments. That’s why robots that are economically viable today are nearly all on factory floors: that’s basically the only setting where you can control the environment well enough for them to be useful. And two, for “advanced” robots (quadrupeds/humanoids) it’s very hard to get them to even balance, much less walk. Yes, there are robots that do this today — surprisingly well, in fact. But there is a tremendous amount going on algorithmically under the hood to make it happen. Figuring out how to make them work took decades of research in controls. This is largely a restatement of what you said above, so I suppose it depends on what you mean by “low level”. My intent above was low level in horse terms, which includes standing and walking. Things humans think of as atomic behaviors.