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ALOHA robot learns from humans to cook, clean, do laundry
- jrvarela56 3y agoCould we use this to sift through trash and separate useful/reusable materials? Cooking sounds more complex, this could be awesome for recycling.
- Animats 3y agoThis is in teleoperated, not autonomous mode. Training data is collected while teleoperating. That robot can do some things autonomously, but not anything like the whole meal task. The Github repository is more useful.[1] That separates autonomous from teleoperated mode. Also, there's video at 1x speed. This thing is actually very slow in autonomous mode. It's real progress, but the hype exceeds the results. [1] https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/ https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/
- autoexec 3y agoEven when we reach a point where the hype is appropriate and the tech is actually ready and I can expect to finally buy a robot that will clean my house and do our dishes I still won't be getting one since you can bet that any robot sold to consumers will be constantly recording audio and video of the inside of our homes to send back to the manufacturer and all of that data will ultimately be used to enrich others at our expense, shared with law enforcement, and most likely end up in the hands of data brokers. The days where new cool technology that would make our lives better was something to look forward to are over. Now it's "How is this new technology going to be used against me?" and "How soon will this technology be deliberately made worse in order to take more from my family?" The best we can hope for is that cleaning robots will be something that people can build and program themselves from trusted parts, but considering how that hasn't worked out for most of the recent tech in our lives today I'm not encouraged. No one I know is using a cell phone, a smart TV, or a modern game console that they built themselves. Most people feel that they are incapable of even putting a simple camera on their own front door that doesn't also hand their data over to amazon and to the police. Until new technology can be truly owned by the people who pay for it, and isn't used against the buyer for someone else's interests I'll be skeptical of every new device and gadget they try to sell us.
- weregiraffe 3y ago>will be constantly recording audio and video of the inside of our homes Just install a Faraday cage around your house. Problem solved! /s
- wegfawefgawefg 3y agoIt could cheaply store a buffer of years of audio and compressed video and transmit at any time later.
- readyplayernull 3y agoJust don't teach the robot how to open a window.
- adroniser 3y ago[flagged]
- TheCapeGreek 3y agoEnshittification is not about governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
- artifact_44 3y ago[dead]
- cheschire 3y agoThe problem isn’t about KGB style spying with half a million employees. The problem is technology enabling automated KGB style spying that feeds automated information operations on an international level. If everything you say in your house is digitally stored in perpetuity, the things you say today can be used to manipulate you tomorrow by either a state or a corporation.
- ceejayoz 3y agoHistorically, plenty have, and sometimes those governments arise unexpectedly and rapidly. We have no idea what a fascist government with the ability to closely monitor every person in real-time looks like yet. Maybe it's the answer to the Fermi paradox.
- sgt101 3y agoThe teleoperated thing was flagged by Rodney Brooks years ago as both a scary risk, but also a driver for autonomous robotics. The threat is that this is a mechanism to partition poor people from richer people comprehensively - they will not be permitted to share the same space but instead will operate proxy bodies that can be confiscated at any time. The poor will live 100's of KM from the rich and will be forced to accept harsh social conditions, and the rich will not have to confront the reality of the poor's humanity. This is a very very bad vision of the future.
- pakitan 3y agoOh, you mean a plumber working from home, just like a programmer? And not having to pay exorbitant real estate prices to live near his clients? What a horror!
- taneq 3y agoNo, they mean a plumber in a country with terrible human rights abuses, working chained to a bench in some horrible sweatshop.
- EGreg 3y agoAnd why would they need this plumber’s services once the robot learns from 8000 plumbing jobs database?
- taneq 3y agoWhy would they pay the per-job API charge for RoboMario when an actual sweatshop worker is cheaper than the first-world electricity to run the server farm?
- e12e 3y agoIt might work half the time in standardized catalog houses/apartments soon - but might need a few hours per job of human guidance in the majority of jobs for the forseeable future?
- 6510 3y ago> It's real progress, but the hype exceeds the results. It's to late, my girlfriend already caught me watching it. Telling her the real thing is slower had no effect. I then told her the final product looks like this. https://youtu.be/ACtozUE6Rzw https://youtu.be/ACtozUE6Rzw
- Mutttttioi 3y agoWhile i do believe that LLMs are much faster in becoming better due to their nature of just being software, i do think that GPT 3 broke the investment barriere due to people just understanding/getting it. With Robots, i also think this is just another demonstration which shows more in what direction it is going than we had bevor. Teslas fake Robot demonstration helps here too. I personally think we are at the start of the robot exponentail curve and i bet i will see a useful working robot in the next 10-20 years. And the usefulness of a robot can be achieved a lot sooner now tx to the AI progress / investment. alone Wishper pushed boundaries a lot. Never seen something free with such a good audio to text quality. If a robot is able to understand "bring this blocks to the top of the building" and will be able to act on it, boom. We are also seeing a lot of progress in similiar fields like game character movement, training physical worlds in virtual simulation (a lot of progress of nvidia and digital twins).
- robot_tty 3y agoThis is cool and interesting work but unfortunately extremely over-hyped. Their whole system is a low cost bimanual system which is interesting. However, beyond that there isn't any algorithmic improvements in here that would make robotics really work. Basically, no real breakthrough has happened in robotics and everyone is hoping to be able to replicate LLMs/vision path for robotics (i.e. data). But no one really knows how to even collect so much high quality data and no one is even remotely close to executing it. The best we seem to have done is: https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/ https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/ Overall, just too much hype.
- krasin 3y ago> Basically, no real breakthrough has happened in robotics and everyone is hoping to be able to replicate LLMs/vision path for robotics (i.e. data). But no one really knows how to even collect so much high quality data and no one is even remotely close to executing it. The best we seem to have done is: https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/ https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/ ALOHA + RT-X is a great combo to collect a lot of somewhat uniform data to enable such a breakthrough. > Overall, just too much hype. True. :)
- hulitu 3y ago> ALOHA + RT-X is a great combo to collect a lot of somewhat uniform data to enable such a breakthrough. Collecting data will not enable anything. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing it since 10 years and no "breakthrough" in sight.
- krasin 3y ago> Collecting data will not enable anything. Historically, this has not been the case. Collecting data enabled speech recognition, image recognition (and subsequent breakthroughs), machine translation. What is so special about Robotics that collecting data will not enable anything?
- 3y ago
- ForOldHack 3y agoBut, can it make me a sandwich?
- pplante 3y agoOnly via superuser privileges.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago$ sudo apt -y install hoagie
- insane_dreamer 3y agounable to locate package hoagie (aka, we're out of flour)
- hammyhavoc 3y agoYou honestly made my day.
- taneq 3y agoIt's an older code, sir, but it checks out. ;) https://xkcd.com/149/ https://xkcd.com/149/
- monero-xmr 3y agoThey couldn't make a robot cook pizza with $500 million invested https://futurism.com/the-byte/robot-pizza-startup-shuts-down https://futurism.com/the-byte/robot-pizza-startup-shuts-down Kitchens are very difficult for humans, let alone robots
- huytersd 3y agoThe problem wasn’t that it couldn’t make a pizza. It couldn’t make a pizza on a moving vehicle.
- pixl97 3y agoAbout to say "robots" or at least assembly line manufacturing makes like a billion pizzas a year with little to no human input.
- sadhorse 3y agoA reminder that so called engineers will bleed you dry before anything. As with many robotics projects, the people hired excel in one thing:doing what they already know. That is why you and I never see new robots.
- taneq 3y agoYou're looking in the wrong place. Give someone $500 million to build a pizza-making robot and they'll build a company designed to justify spending $500 million. Give a bunch of top tier engineering/CS students some budget for printer filament and pizza toppings over the summer holidays and they'll probably build you a functional pizza robot.
- waltbosz 3y agoI've spend some time imaging about the day when general purpose cooking robots are inexpensive enough to be as ubiquitous as indoor plumbing. How would it affect peoples' diets? Would we eat more healthily because our robot can easily cook delicious and nutritious meals? Or would we have our robots make us delicious unhealthy meals?
- deterministic 3y agoOne problem is that experts can’t even agree on what a “healthy” diet is. See Vegan vs. Low-Carb/Carnivore. For every documentary “proving” that one is better than the other, there is another one “proving” the opposite. There are doctors, professors of nutrition, corruption, paid for research results, and people who have dramatically improved their health on both sides of the battle line. Nutritional science nowadays reminds me more of politics or religion than science. With people screaming at each other from different camps.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- huytersd 3y agoI think the operative word here is delicious.
- crooked-v 3y agoIt depends on how good the robot is at it. Anyone can make a meal taste better fast by just dumping extra butter into everything.
- CM30 3y agoI suspect it'd help people vary up their diets more at least, since they can ask for something new rather than rehashing the same 5-10 meal types over and over again. Would that make for healthier food? Maybe, because at least part of why at least some people eat unhealthily is because it's easy to cook the same few things over and over again.
- keenmaster 3y agoThere are some genuinely delicious foods that are healthier than junk food and most people would agree tastes better, but they don’t want to cook or don’t want to learn. A robot that excels at cooking can serve you a delicious, healthy meal from a different cuisine every day. Theoretically you can go for years without having the same meal twice. The robot can also take your target macros and nutrition into consideration when deciding on what to cook and how much of it.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoSlightly off topic, is there an open source robot today that could transfer clothes from a washing machine (Front loading) to a dryer autonomously?
- hinoki 3y agoDoes it need to get all the socks? Even the ones stuck between the frame and the drum? That might be at least as difficult as folding.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alfanick 3y agoHaving a robot to solve that problem seems like overengineering - there are integrated washing-machine/dryer combos in one appliance, bit less efficient then separate devices, but solves the problem of transferring the clothes.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoPerhaps I am not updated with the times but last I checked combo machines have no proper lint filters and are a lot more messy in terms of end result dust/fibers.
- Legend2440 3y agoAgreed. The only reason to want a household robot is if it is general enough to do many tasks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- euroderf 3y agoSpam me when it can clean the bathroom.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoI am pretty sure I've seen videos of commercial robots power washing public bathrooms. Probably not a solution for normal bathrooms with wood furniture and fabric items but it is definitely possible today.
- euroderf 3y agoIn Scandinavia you get a lot of ceramics, such that a shower+toilet can effectively be the "water room". I'd think that ceramic tiles can be tackled by a 'bot. A flat, unyielding surface, usually with a light color that provides high contrast with gunk. Bring on the ScrubBots(TM).
- vidarh 3y agoAs a Norwegian in the UK, I've spent 24 years despairing over - and annoying anyone within earshot by talking about - the lack of proper wetrooms in most UK houses. In fact, a lot of British builders seem to think making floors waterproof requires dark magic. It's slowly getting better, but it's still confusing enough of them.
- insane_dreamer 3y agoyeah, properly designed public toilets such as these could easily be cleaned by a robot https://portlandloo.com/ https://portlandloo.com/
- euroderf 3y agoReminds me, I read once about a guy who made a plastic-lined living room with plastic furniture and a drain in the floor. Post-party cleanup was just pointing a hose at it all.
- wutwutwat 3y agoWe don’t need to be concerned until robots can figure out how to pack suitcases entirely on their own.
- markdown 3y agoWhy is it called ALOHA?
- zeitgeistcowboy 3y agoFrom https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha.aspx https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha.aspx it looks like it's derived from "A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation" without the S, B or T.
- ivan4th 3y agoOthers mention autonomous mode thing being overhyped somewhat. But besides, that starts to remind me of home automation in Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains"... There was also a Soviet animation film based on that short story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gcanyon 3y agoI think it's in Heinlein's The Door Into Summer where the protagonist is a robotics expert. One part of the story that always bugged me was when the protagonist describes training household robots by showing them what to do. The line is something like, "Let it watch you wash the dishes once and you never have to wash the dishes again." Teenage me read that years ago and scoffed, thinking "that's now how programming code works, like, at all." Now with this robot and the new Rabbit device from CES, it seems that Heinlein was exactly right.
- yardie 3y agoIndustrial robots have a training mode where the motors and clutches are disengaged so the operator can position this multi-ton robot through the movements it wants it to make. I thought that was really cool to watch them being programmed through physical input.
- Mutttttioi 3y agoThats why i think that AI/LLMs etc. are a gamechanger: Not because they can generate text (which is impressive by itself) but because they are very very good in translating human wishes into computer interfaces. Hi robot, here is my kitchen. Here are dishes etc.
- qgin 3y agoIt's a strange thing to see ML now making computers work how non-programmers think they've always worked.
- insane_dreamer 3y ago> we are able to achieve over 80% success on these tasks with only 50 human demonstrations per task The challenge is that 80% accuracy is a far cry from being actually useful in real-world situations to the point where humans can rely on them to perform the desired task correctly. They have to "just work". And closing the gap on that last 20% becomes exponentially difficult.
- btbuildem 3y agoI think this has a really good use case in homes of people who have physical limitations. The robot can augment their reach / mobility / dexterity, while they are still able to control it and improve the problem-solving abilities of the system. Kind of like a spatially distributed cyborg. Imagine being confined in bed or in a wheelchair, and have this thing be your gofer / nimble hands. It could be a gamechanger for so many!
- martythemaniak 3y agoDo middle-aged (ie <45 years old) people realize that these robots will be their primary caregivers when they are old? People are having fewer children and populations are shrinking in most places. For increasingly large numbers of people, there really won't be anyone around to take care of you or help you out when you're old (ie, >70). You're either gonna have a humanoid to help you live independently, or you're gonna have a bad time.
- ModernMech 3y agolol yeah, I've actually been building these kinds of assistive robots with that expectation :P I'm looking forward to my autonomous wheelchair and my Paro plushie: http://www.parorobots.com http://www.parorobots.com