4 ms·

That's all kind of pathetically underwhelming. The video is at 6x speed and the robot is shown pushing some chairs forward, placing a pot in an empty cupboard a

That's all kind of pathetically underwhelming. The video is at 6x speed and the robot is shown pushing some chairs forward, placing a pot in an empty cupboard and ... frying one prawn? One prawn? All those are toy tasks that have no application in a real environment, even the constrained and save environment of a home. Most homes don't have such large empty spaces. Most of the time when you need to tidy up a bunch of chairs they're not put in a neat straight line by a RA, they're left in a jumbled mess by a stampede of students and you have to do a lot more pushing and pulling and turning around (and there's tables and possibly empty cups and stuff). Most of the time you need to cook a lot more than one measly prawn. And let's not talk about the primordial chaos of kitchen cupboards. What's worse with all those demonstrations: the robots can only do exactly what you see in the video. Change the parameters even slightly: different shape pan, different height cupboard, different room configuration; and the magick -poof- vanishes, into thin air. That stuff doesn't work. We aren't even close to solving autonomous robotic behaviour. RL doesn't work and the older techniques aren't working either (planning). All that stuff ever does is get published into papers, advertised with fanfare and then forgotten because it never makes it to the real world, because it's all unreliable and unpredictable and costs too much if you want to do anything real, and that's always something trivial. So the state-of-the-art in robotics is in hand-coded industrial robots that do one thing and do it over and over again and nobody asks them to generalise, or to come into your house and cook you a prawn.

nmca 3y ago
It's a lot better than last year, and techniques seem very general.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  Not general at all. In all the object manipulation tasks the objects to be manipulated have been placed just so. If you change the placement (or the objects), you need to retrain. And it would be extremely computationally expensive to get the robot to learn to carry out the whole task on its own, from finding and retrieving, e.g. the shrimp, the oil, the plate, the slotted spoon and the pan, one by one, before having to use them all in the right order. That (hierarchical task planning) is a problem that is not yet solved (because it's combinatorially hard) and eliminates any idea of "general" ability: you have to set things up perfectly before the robot can do anything. Exactly like for industrial robots. It just looks more general because it's inside a house rather than a factory.
  - nmca 3y ago
    idk about hierarchical planning just ask an LLM it'll probably work https://say-can.github.io/ https://say-can.github.io/
deleted 3y ago
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imtringued 3y ago
We aren't even close? What? The robot is doing its tasks properly. What you are complaining about is actually a minor problem. Ok the robot is 6x slower than it should be, that can be fixed by building faster robots. One day it will be 3x slower, then 2x, then 1x, then, oops. What's wrong with only being trained to use a specific tool? The robot is designed to be easy to train via teleoperation. If you told me that one day it's going to be cheaper to program a robot to press a button than to remodel the switch to be robot friendly I would take these demonstrations as evidence. The things you are complaining about are quite trivial. For example, they could have added a second prawn... Edit: I just realized that it is only the first video was sped up by 6x. So basically, the robot is already fast enough and can only get faster.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  >> What's wrong with only being trained to use a specific tool? The robot is designed to be easy to train via teleoperation. What's wrong is the fact that it's not just one tool, but one particular tool (specific size, shape, colour etc), placed in one specific way on one specific countertop, in one specific kitchen etc etc. Try to calculate how many different configurations there can be of this combination and you'll convince yourself that there is no way to make any real progress with methods that rely on such specific conditions and have to be re-trained everytime any detail changes. As a for instance, the robot trained to fry one measly little prawn would have to be trained again to fry two, or to fry them in a bigger or smaller pan, etc. Btw, the robot didn't fry the prawn. It pretended to. Because it has no way to tell when the prawn is fried. Good luck training it to do that. >> Edit: I just realized that it is only the first video was sped up by 6x. So basically, the robot is already fast enough and can only get faster. I was talking about the initial video, not the others. And you're wrong- that's the limit of the hardware. To make it faster the researchers will have to build a faster robot and that still doesn't change what it can and cannot do, at any speed, fast or slow. The speed doesn't have anything to do with generality. >> One day it will be 3x slower, then 2x, then 1x, then, oops. One day we will all live on Mars and consort with aliens. I like science fiction too, but this is proposed as real-world progress, right now. Well, it ain't.

nmca 3y ago

It's a lot better than last year, and techniques seem very general.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
Not general at all. In all the object manipulation tasks the objects to be manipulated have been placed just so. If you change the placement (or the objects), you need to retrain. And it would be extremely computationally expensive to get the robot to learn to carry out the whole task on its own, from finding and retrieving, e.g. the shrimp, the oil, the plate, the slotted spoon and the pan, one by one, before having to use them all in the right order. That (hierarchical task planning) is a problem that is not yet solved (because it's combinatorially hard) and eliminates any idea of "general" ability: you have to set things up perfectly before the robot can do anything. Exactly like for industrial robots. It just looks more general because it's inside a house rather than a factory.
- nmca 3y ago
  idk about hierarchical planning just ask an LLM it'll probably work https://say-can.github.io/ https://say-can.github.io/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

imtringued 3y ago

We aren't even close? What? The robot is doing its tasks properly. What you are complaining about is actually a minor problem. Ok the robot is 6x slower than it should be, that can be fixed by building faster robots. One day it will be 3x slower, then 2x, then 1x, then, oops. What's wrong with only being trained to use a specific tool? The robot is designed to be easy to train via teleoperation. If you told me that one day it's going to be cheaper to program a robot to press a button than to remodel the switch to be robot friendly I would take these demonstrations as evidence. The things you are complaining about are quite trivial. For example, they could have added a second prawn... Edit: I just realized that it is only the first video was sped up by 6x. So basically, the robot is already fast enough and can only get faster.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> What's wrong with only being trained to use a specific tool? The robot is designed to be easy to train via teleoperation. What's wrong is the fact that it's not just one tool, but one particular tool (specific size, shape, colour etc), placed in one specific way on one specific countertop, in one specific kitchen etc etc. Try to calculate how many different configurations there can be of this combination and you'll convince yourself that there is no way to make any real progress with methods that rely on such specific conditions and have to be re-trained everytime any detail changes. As a for instance, the robot trained to fry one measly little prawn would have to be trained again to fry two, or to fry them in a bigger or smaller pan, etc. Btw, the robot didn't fry the prawn. It pretended to. Because it has no way to tell when the prawn is fried. Good luck training it to do that. >> Edit: I just realized that it is only the first video was sped up by 6x. So basically, the robot is already fast enough and can only get faster. I was talking about the initial video, not the others. And you're wrong- that's the limit of the hardware. To make it faster the researchers will have to build a faster robot and that still doesn't change what it can and cannot do, at any speed, fast or slow. The speed doesn't have anything to do with generality. >> One day it will be 3x slower, then 2x, then 1x, then, oops. One day we will all live on Mars and consort with aliens. I like science fiction too, but this is proposed as real-world progress, right now. Well, it ain't.