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Robotics founder here. Popular conceptions of "robots" are unrealistically general. In industry, we do not build robots, we build automation systems. Given t

Robotics founder here. Popular conceptions of "robots" are unrealistically general. In industry, we do not build robots, we build automation systems. Given the choice, would you prefer an automation system with some environmental assumptions, high speed and perfect repeatability (ie. entire industrial automation world), or no environmental assumptions, crushingly high cost, slow speed and poor reliability (eg. walking robot that accesses your fridge because cute or novel)? It seems both the lay population and academia assumes the latter, but industry demands the former. This is perhaps why there are so many "open problems" - because they're not actually real world problems: they're just academic nice-to-haves.

arethuza 6y ago
As an aside, this reminds me of the AI vs AGI debate (which I admit I indulge in being a former academic researcher in good old-fashioned AI) - almost all of the focus in modern "AI" appears to be be focused on solving specific tasks - which is completely understandable.
mikro2nd 6y ago
Depends what you're after, I guess. If all you want is a 'slave' that does some repeatable action with specified accuracy, then an automation system is just the thing. If you're after exploring the questions around what it means to be an autonomous, sentient being, then perhaps not so much and you really want to build a robot.
- azernik 6y ago
  The money (and hence most of the engineering time) is in making people's lives and jobs easier, not in exploring deep philosophical questions.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
bad_alloc 6y ago
Well, most elements on this list would allow us to move beyond needing so many assumptions. Lots of cost could be saved if I didn't need to perfectly measure all my owrkoffsets or didn't have to spend lots of time on designing my workspace to avoid singularities. Also it would allow us to move from relatively narrow-purpose machines ("move this end effector to this position within +/-0.01mm") to much more general jobs, hence opening more to automation.
imtringued 6y ago
Industrial automation is boring. Sure micron level accuracy sounds cool but it's so expensive it is only accessible for industrial automation. Only a tiny percentage of the population will ever be around those "robots". I don't understand what you mean by crushingly high cost. You've saved most of the cost by reducing tolerance requirements such as zero backlash which will cost thousands of dollars for just a single gearbox.
roland35 6y ago
Thank you for putting what I have always thought into a clear paragraph! Back when I was working on a consumer robotics system that issue (what can we expect a random consumer to do to their home/yard to simplify the robot's job) was a constant tension with marketing. Because obviously they want a product that a customer just drops into their yard and does everything including weeding and picking up dog poop with no setup. However, if we can help the robot by modifying the environment a little, it makes a huge improvement to reliability and cost. I would love to work on robots again, it is a fun problem to try and work out!
thdrdt 6y ago
Thinking about car painting robots it's clearly about cost. You can program a car painting robot in some hours. This will be way cheaper than a robot that is aware of the car and knows how it should move to perform the best paint job. Another example is your washing machine. It would be nice to have a washing robot that would sort your clothes and wash them. But it is way cheaper to sort clothes yourself. So a cloth sorting problem might be an open problem but is indeed a nice-to-have.
- legulere 6y ago
  Another open problem: taking machines apart for recycling.
  - andrewnc 6y ago
    This is a problem I've been passively thinking about and would LOVE to tackle full time. Any VCs out there have piles of cash they want throw my way?
    - tomcam 6y ago
      > Any VCs out there have piles of cash they want throw my way? I think maybe you need to refine your slide deck a little
- bluGill 6y ago
  A robot that is aware of the car is long term better because you don't have to spend hours programming for each car and paint scheme. However the problem is hard enough that right now we spend hours because it works and industrial automation has enough advantages that it is worth doing anyway.
  - roland35 6y ago
    That robot may be more valuable in a company that makes custom items like toys or signage. For car manufacturing, they are making hundreds of thousands of cars a year of the same exact shape, so a few hours if setup isn't to bad!
legulere 6y ago
With specialized automation you get a lock-in effect because they are still expensive enough that you have to use them when you buy them.
supportlocal4h 6y ago
It intrigues me that most people do not consider a refrigerator to be a robot. Same for a backhoe or a blender. The distinction between "machine" and "robot" is interesting. A traditional tractor is not a robot, but a driverless tractor is?
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  Maybe related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- dorgo 6y ago
  Could it be that a refrigerator is a final-state-machine and a robot is higher in the hierarchy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory
Symmetry 6y ago
There are happy middle grounds which are neither the rote repetition of industrial production nor the impossibly unstructured environments a theoretical butler robot would have to work in. I work piece picking and, with a succession of unknown objects to pick up and place, the problem is both interesting and achievable.
- contingencies 6y ago
  Almost all picking is done with pneumatic suction because it's highly reliable, powerful, relatively safe and easily adaptable. Furthermore, the standard silicone nozzles on the market permit varying amounts of safety margin due to squishiness. You can solve for almost every real world picking problem without more custom hardware than perhaps a mounting plate and scale instantly to mass-produced parallelism. This is why the industry has standardized on this approach... it's practical, cheap, fast and quickly adaptable. The other 1% of items is a problem only in the case that the thing to be picked is either particularly complicated and irregular in shape, or has some delicate physical property. The annoying case, which seems to be what you are working on, is large numbers of unknown items. If you start with recognition that no system will work with arbitrary items (the 'best case' generalized picking system will still be necessarily limited by maximum size of the object it can pick, the reach of the picking/placing motion, the weight it can support, and its accuracy/repeatability), this is a difficult field to justify research in, as while an algorithm aiming at generalizing solutions in this space can probably find a way to use the standard pneumatic approach against, say, the largest exposed flat surface of an unseen item after collecting a point cloud or grasping using opposite surfaces or enclose convex faces with an alternate gripping mechanism, these are never going to increase the generality to an absolute extent. Sadly, with this increased complexity comes diminishing returns, increased cost (sensors, actuators, computation, latency, etc.) and counter-intuitively (unless a major paradigm shift is obtained) also therefore a diminishing market. Logically, then, the process governing new item ingress for whatever operations you are automating may likely be a better place to spend time than chasing after a non-existent magic algorithm / gripper design to solve for arbitrary cases. For example: "Mandate square boxes" elegantly solves the problem, as per international shipping. You don't actually need enclosed boxes - stackable trays work fine too. About the only case where random item picking makes sense outside of garbage sorting is very large scale general warehousing for hugely dissimilar items, the sort of problem only Amazon has. For almost anyone else, sacrificing storage space efficiency with boxes or segmenting in to multiple specialised systems are likely better tradeoffs.
mediaman 6y ago
Manufacturing company founder here - you are exactly right. I buy automation equipment. What I'm looking for is stuff that is relatively easy to program by my team (I do not have the money for tons of engineers to sit around programming arcane stuff), can attain a reasonably good speed, and has the reach and weight capacity I need. And I want economic cost with reasonably good reliability. Two-handed human-like arms don't interest me. Robots with human-like eyes don't interest me. Safety systems that are too sophisticated/cute/fancy aren't that interesting to me - usually cages or more recently torque sensitive movement is good enough to keep people safe around the robot. Often the trickiest part is the design of the end of arm tool, not the robot, and I feel this is where most innovation could happen that would benefit my operations. By the way, the above is why Rethink Robotics failed and Universal Robots (which got way less press coverage, and raised less money, and had a non-celebrity founder) was wildly successful. Universal built a co-bot with a single arm that was fast (enough) and could carry enough weight. It didn't look human at all. Rethink had an LCD panel with eyes on it and two arms and a sonar person presence detector and its animated eyes would look at nearby people to indicate it was aware of them. But it was slow and not as accurate. Universal Robots made the product manufacturers actually wanted.
dorgo 6y ago
Given the choice, would you prefer an automation system with some environmental assumptions, high speed and perfect repeatability, or less environmental assumptions, slightly higher cost, slower speed and poorer reliability?
- bluGill 6y ago
  Depends on what it does. A robot that drives my kids to school has different constraints from a robot that cleans my kitchen after I'm done. The latter can be made safe by putting a locked door on the kitchen (which in turn means open floor plans are out). But the kitchen robot it allowed to take hours (not days) to do what I can handle in a few minutes. The get my kid to school robot needs to have speed.
oytis 6y ago
Well, that's what research is about: to solve the said problems more reliably, faster and in the end at lower cost.

arethuza 6y ago

As an aside, this reminds me of the AI vs AGI debate (which I admit I indulge in being a former academic researcher in good old-fashioned AI) - almost all of the focus in modern "AI" appears to be be focused on solving specific tasks - which is completely understandable.

mikro2nd 6y ago

Depends what you're after, I guess. If all you want is a 'slave' that does some repeatable action with specified accuracy, then an automation system is just the thing. If you're after exploring the questions around what it means to be an autonomous, sentient being, then perhaps not so much and you really want to build a robot.

azernik 6y ago
The money (and hence most of the engineering time) is in making people's lives and jobs easier, not in exploring deep philosophical questions.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

bad_alloc 6y ago

Well, most elements on this list would allow us to move beyond needing so many assumptions. Lots of cost could be saved if I didn't need to perfectly measure all my owrkoffsets or didn't have to spend lots of time on designing my workspace to avoid singularities. Also it would allow us to move from relatively narrow-purpose machines ("move this end effector to this position within +/-0.01mm") to much more general jobs, hence opening more to automation.

imtringued 6y ago

Industrial automation is boring. Sure micron level accuracy sounds cool but it's so expensive it is only accessible for industrial automation. Only a tiny percentage of the population will ever be around those "robots". I don't understand what you mean by crushingly high cost. You've saved most of the cost by reducing tolerance requirements such as zero backlash which will cost thousands of dollars for just a single gearbox.

roland35 6y ago

Thank you for putting what I have always thought into a clear paragraph! Back when I was working on a consumer robotics system that issue (what can we expect a random consumer to do to their home/yard to simplify the robot's job) was a constant tension with marketing. Because obviously they want a product that a customer just drops into their yard and does everything including weeding and picking up dog poop with no setup. However, if we can help the robot by modifying the environment a little, it makes a huge improvement to reliability and cost. I would love to work on robots again, it is a fun problem to try and work out!

thdrdt 6y ago

Thinking about car painting robots it's clearly about cost. You can program a car painting robot in some hours. This will be way cheaper than a robot that is aware of the car and knows how it should move to perform the best paint job. Another example is your washing machine. It would be nice to have a washing robot that would sort your clothes and wash them. But it is way cheaper to sort clothes yourself. So a cloth sorting problem might be an open problem but is indeed a nice-to-have.

legulere 6y ago
Another open problem: taking machines apart for recycling.
- andrewnc 6y ago
  This is a problem I've been passively thinking about and would LOVE to tackle full time. Any VCs out there have piles of cash they want throw my way?
  - tomcam 6y ago
    > Any VCs out there have piles of cash they want throw my way? I think maybe you need to refine your slide deck a little
bluGill 6y ago
A robot that is aware of the car is long term better because you don't have to spend hours programming for each car and paint scheme. However the problem is hard enough that right now we spend hours because it works and industrial automation has enough advantages that it is worth doing anyway.
- roland35 6y ago
  That robot may be more valuable in a company that makes custom items like toys or signage. For car manufacturing, they are making hundreds of thousands of cars a year of the same exact shape, so a few hours if setup isn't to bad!

legulere 6y ago

With specialized automation you get a lock-in effect because they are still expensive enough that you have to use them when you buy them.

supportlocal4h 6y ago

It intrigues me that most people do not consider a refrigerator to be a robot. Same for a backhoe or a blender. The distinction between "machine" and "robot" is interesting. A traditional tractor is not a robot, but a driverless tractor is?

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
Maybe related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
dorgo 6y ago
Could it be that a refrigerator is a final-state-machine and a robot is higher in the hierarchy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory

Symmetry 6y ago

There are happy middle grounds which are neither the rote repetition of industrial production nor the impossibly unstructured environments a theoretical butler robot would have to work in. I work piece picking and, with a succession of unknown objects to pick up and place, the problem is both interesting and achievable.

contingencies 6y ago
Almost all picking is done with pneumatic suction because it's highly reliable, powerful, relatively safe and easily adaptable. Furthermore, the standard silicone nozzles on the market permit varying amounts of safety margin due to squishiness. You can solve for almost every real world picking problem without more custom hardware than perhaps a mounting plate and scale instantly to mass-produced parallelism. This is why the industry has standardized on this approach... it's practical, cheap, fast and quickly adaptable. The other 1% of items is a problem only in the case that the thing to be picked is either particularly complicated and irregular in shape, or has some delicate physical property. The annoying case, which seems to be what you are working on, is large numbers of unknown items. If you start with recognition that no system will work with arbitrary items (the 'best case' generalized picking system will still be necessarily limited by maximum size of the object it can pick, the reach of the picking/placing motion, the weight it can support, and its accuracy/repeatability), this is a difficult field to justify research in, as while an algorithm aiming at generalizing solutions in this space can probably find a way to use the standard pneumatic approach against, say, the largest exposed flat surface of an unseen item after collecting a point cloud or grasping using opposite surfaces or enclose convex faces with an alternate gripping mechanism, these are never going to increase the generality to an absolute extent. Sadly, with this increased complexity comes diminishing returns, increased cost (sensors, actuators, computation, latency, etc.) and counter-intuitively (unless a major paradigm shift is obtained) also therefore a diminishing market. Logically, then, the process governing new item ingress for whatever operations you are automating may likely be a better place to spend time than chasing after a non-existent magic algorithm / gripper design to solve for arbitrary cases. For example: "Mandate square boxes" elegantly solves the problem, as per international shipping. You don't actually need enclosed boxes - stackable trays work fine too. About the only case where random item picking makes sense outside of garbage sorting is very large scale general warehousing for hugely dissimilar items, the sort of problem only Amazon has. For almost anyone else, sacrificing storage space efficiency with boxes or segmenting in to multiple specialised systems are likely better tradeoffs.

mediaman 6y ago

Manufacturing company founder here - you are exactly right. I buy automation equipment. What I'm looking for is stuff that is relatively easy to program by my team (I do not have the money for tons of engineers to sit around programming arcane stuff), can attain a reasonably good speed, and has the reach and weight capacity I need. And I want economic cost with reasonably good reliability. Two-handed human-like arms don't interest me. Robots with human-like eyes don't interest me. Safety systems that are too sophisticated/cute/fancy aren't that interesting to me - usually cages or more recently torque sensitive movement is good enough to keep people safe around the robot. Often the trickiest part is the design of the end of arm tool, not the robot, and I feel this is where most innovation could happen that would benefit my operations. By the way, the above is why Rethink Robotics failed and Universal Robots (which got way less press coverage, and raised less money, and had a non-celebrity founder) was wildly successful. Universal built a co-bot with a single arm that was fast (enough) and could carry enough weight. It didn't look human at all. Rethink had an LCD panel with eyes on it and two arms and a sonar person presence detector and its animated eyes would look at nearby people to indicate it was aware of them. But it was slow and not as accurate. Universal Robots made the product manufacturers actually wanted.

dorgo 6y ago

Given the choice, would you prefer an automation system with some environmental assumptions, high speed and perfect repeatability, or less environmental assumptions, slightly higher cost, slower speed and poorer reliability?

bluGill 6y ago
Depends on what it does. A robot that drives my kids to school has different constraints from a robot that cleans my kitchen after I'm done. The latter can be made safe by putting a locked door on the kitchen (which in turn means open floor plans are out). But the kitchen robot it allowed to take hours (not days) to do what I can handle in a few minutes. The get my kid to school robot needs to have speed.

oytis 6y ago

Well, that's what research is about: to solve the said problems more reliably, faster and in the end at lower cost.