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Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab
- annoyingnoob 5y agoI want to see what happens when it runs over a banana or has to wipe yogurt off the table.
- finolex1 5y agoJust curious, do they use an in-house simulator for research? Or a more commonplace one like Unity/Gazebo?
- rvz 5y agoShit just got real.
- ModernMech 5y agoI mean, this is demonstrating things the now dead PR2 demonstrated a decade ago, and even then it was nothing new. Since then there have been a string of startups just like this one that have come and gone. This one comes to mind: https://singularityhub.com/2013/10/24/willow-garage-spinoff-launches-ubr-1-one-armed-mobile-robot/ https://singularityhub.com/2013/10/24/willow-garage-spinoff-... Also: https://robots.ieee.org/robots/baxter/ https://robots.ieee.org/robots/baxter/ These people sell robots that are in stores now: https://www.badger-technologies.com https://www.badger-technologies.com We'll see if something with an arm has as much success, but so far not much as evidenced by the graveyard of companies that have been trying. One will crack the code soon, maybe this one.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoAvogadro Corp! https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13184491-avogadro-corp https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13184491-avogadro-cor...
- blueflow 5y agoI strongly feel like this is an insult to life itself. I do not wish to incorporate such technology into my daily life.
- dgritsko 5y agoThis feels a little hyperbolic - did we read the same article? I'm looking at a GIF of a robot pushing a chair a few inches, and fail to see how it could come across as "an insult to life itself." What provokes such a strong reaction for you? As someone who knows very little about this space, the concept of using a virtual world to rapidly train on various tasks seems fascinating. I had a similar reaction upon hearing how GTA V was used to help train a neural network for self-driving cars a few years back.
- blueflow 5y agoAfter a decade of working with computers both in my free time & at work, i'm disgusted by the idea of computers walking around, even having arms.
- epberry 5y agoHow can you not think this is great? Freeing humans from menial tasks is the way forward. Remember when people (mostly women) would spend hours washing? Machines and automation freed them.
- howaboutnope 5y ago> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. -- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdmkv https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...
- willis936 5y agoThe solution isn't less robots. Automation isn't the enemy, poverty is.
- bamboozled 5y agoPoverty will be easier to enforce with emotionless robotic cops.
- falcolas 5y agoAutomation solves problems that can be addressed by people in poverty. Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners. There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US). Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government. This historically doesn't end well.
- willis936 5y ago
- e2le 5y agoHopefully this will lead to robots being made available on the market that can take over those kinds of service jobs.
- ehnto 5y agoCould you elaborate on why you want that?
- toisanji 5y agothe problem with all of these robots is that they can't go where humans go. Humans and animals can basically travel on any terrain. they have to be on flat surfaces and so the floors need to be made for them. That means they can't go on stairs, uneven surfaces, dirt, grass, docks, rocky surfaces, etc. If this is solved, it opens up so many more opportunities.
- ModernMech 5y agoThat's why you start with indoor robots. Because of the ADA, they should be able to go anywhere that a person with a wheelchair can go... which is pretty much all the places in our public life. Yes, they won't go off-roading, but that's okay as a starting point.
- wpietri 5y agoFor sure. And the other solution is facilities built for machinery first, not humans. As an example, pretty much any factory floor is designed on this principle. The interesting question to me is how much household design will shift. Both the rise of the automobile and the decline of household servants have shifted architecture.
- lnsru 5y agoI wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.
- amelius 5y agoSadly, unlike technology our social structures will never advance.
- airstrike 5y agoI'd say we've come a long way from chiefdom
- TheBlight 5y agoUBI and full automation sounds nice but it leaves you with no leverage. You will end up relying completely on the compassion of your rulers.
- ModernMech 5y agoThis is why UBI is the capitalist solution to a post-scarcity world; it still places capitalists at the top of the pyramid as the owners and beneficiaries of capital. The solution we should be striving for in a post-scarcity world is democratic ownership of capital like robots, so that we may all share in the fruits of their labor.
- germinalphrase 5y agoAnd how does one argue for that future without immediately being labeled a communist/socialist seeking to nationalize the (robotic) means of production?
- ModernMech 5y agoSidestep and don’t engage with any labels. In my experience 99% of people who throw that word around as a pejorative can’t articulate what socialism is and how it upsets them. If you avoid any overt labels and stick to substantive topics, it’s very possible to have deep conversations with such people where they reveal they agree with some socialist ideas without even knowing it.
- madiator 5y agoAny progress is great progress here. I am looking forward to a day when I can buy a robot that can do laundry end to end, from taking to the laundry machine, transferring to the dryer, to folding the clothes!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nynx 5y agoLooks like a company doing meaningful work. Wonder if they have internships.
- airstrike 5y agoGod, this "smooth" scrolling is unbearable
- madamelic 5y agoThey should design a robot to slap them across the face every time someone suggests "Let's change how scrolling works" Please. Stop. Don't do that. It's weird and unnatural, leave scrolling alone.
- dang 5y ago"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sleepysysadmin 5y agoWe have ever increased the number of bullshit jobs that produce nothing. They don't even do anything to pretend they do something. David Graiber talked at length about this issue. On the left wing, people like Andrew Yang, are proponents of UBI. The right wing is scared of UBI because if we do UBI, those bullshit job holders might just stay home. That will be a disaster in so many ways. Flipside, lets not do UBI and instead do automation. We put all these bullshit job holders out of a job. It's exactly the same disaster, possibly even worse. Lets now propose the government makes only themselves the only legal owner of any commercial robot. So Ford has to rent the robots from the government. That rent money goes to paying the bullshit job holders. It's the same disaster. It's not just economical or political disaster. It's even mental health. There's a very large number of people whose entire self-worth derives heavily from their job. Pay them to stay home and they'll be depressed at home. I think Keynes is someone who figured out first. The 40 hour work week needs to die. The best solution any government can do is stop changing minimum wage but start decreasing the threshold for overtime. We need to pressure the 40 hour work week down. Which is happening to some degree. Many countries have pressured down to ~37 hours. This is where we must go to solve the problem.
- gwbas1c 5y agoMeta: Something on that page really screws with the scroll wheel. I barely touch the wheel and the page scrolls an entire screen. It's like someone put some kind of smooth scrolling plugin on the page.