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I am sure robot assistants will be quite integral to our society later but am I just uninformed or does there seem to be lack of progress for the actual mechani
by tomalaci 4y ago
I am sure robot assistants will be quite integral to our society later but am I just uninformed or does there seem to be lack of progress for the actual mechanical engineering of robots? They all still seem these big, hulking and clunky metal pieces with very rigid movements (not very flexible). One of them might also just slip on a banana peel and crush someone.
- comfypotato 4y agoThey’re just very complicated. A good exercise is to think of all of the computations required to point at something across the room. From a biomechanics perspective, there is a lot going on. Even if you just model each muscle in your arm/hand/finger as attached at two points and contracting, the force diagram of all the bones/joints quickly becomes exhausting. The biomechanics of what humans do for basic locomotion is extremely complicated to model/recreate. While robots don’t need all the details (wheels, for example, make things easier) there is still a lot to deal with to make machines that can interact with our world. It’s one thing to design an assembly-line robot that performs a single task. Making a robot that can do multiple useful things quickly explodes in complexity. There is steady progress in the field, but it’s slow.