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Loved the TFA. I've been working on robotics pretty much my whole career and people usually miss how complicated it can get even for simple things once you con

Loved the TFA. I've been working on robotics pretty much my whole career and people usually miss how complicated it can get even for simple things once you consider what can go wrong AND it's a meeting place for a multitude of areas: hardware, software, mechanical, electrical, machine learning, computer vision, control, driver, database, etc. An issue can hide in between any of those for months before it shows up with bells and whistles. What is sometimes difficult to get across to people is that building robots is not only difficult per se, but the base of comparison is unusually unfair: if you build an e-commerce website you benchmark it against other e-commerce websites, maybe Amazon, maybe ebay; for robots usually the benchmark is against people, the most adaptable and fault tolerant machine that exists, every robot will suck compared to a human doing the same task, but that's what we compare it to every time.

lukan 3y ago
"every robot will suck compared to a human doing the same task, but that's what we compare it to every time" What about a factory robot, welding together a part of a car?
- DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
  That would fall under the "automation" category: a very specialized customized application of robotics, doing the same set of tasks over and over, this is the kind of application where we can really see the power of robotics, but rest assured that countless hours were spent testing/improving/optimizing/safe guarding these workflows and after every section in an assembly line there will be manual inspection to flag for bad / missing weldings and potential service of the machinery involved.
  - gertlex 3y ago
    Would "single purpose robot" be another reasonable term for welding robots? Just musing. The earlier "when compared to humans" statement definitely sounds pretty accurate to me, worded as "mutli-purpose robots currently always are less robust than humans at the same set of tasks" (or similar)
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >mutli-purpose robots currently always are less robust than humans at the same set of tasks Specialization has tradeoffs. Humans are very optimized generalists but very few of us become specialist at more than one thing. Even in that case a specialized machine/robot can be far faster, depending on the task of course. Of course humans have a lot of trade offs for their abilities as generalists... taking years to mature, requiring sleep, poor integration with computer systems are just some of them.
- stonemetal12 3y ago
  Those aren't robots they are industrial automation. :) As soon as it gets practical it stops being robotics.
  - ska 3y ago
    > As soon as it gets practical it stops being robotics. This idea co-evolved in "AI"
  - hugs 3y ago
    A potential corollary: As soon is gets practical, it also stops looking like a robot. Once you know how many degrees of freedom are truly needed to solve a problem, you start removing unnecessary parts in the design to lower cost and assembly complexity. Thus, once your cool new C-3PO has perfected the art of making toast, it's only a matter of time until you re-engineer it into looking like a toaster.
    - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
      No, I don't think so. We already have toasters, robots are for the tasks that can't be done by such simple machines.
      - lukan 3y ago
        A toaster cannot make a toast alone. It has to be inserted and removed and put on a plate. That's what I want a robot for (one day, after I am sure, it will not accidently toast me).
        BobaFloutist 3y ago
        The question is, is this actually worth it over a toaster with climate-controlled toast-hopper that dispenses directly onto a clean plate from a plate dispenser. And if that feels too expensive and space-intensive for mere toast, just think of how much worse a robot would be!
      - DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
dlivingston 3y ago
Do you like working in robotics? How is the work, pay, environment, and industry? I've entertained the idea of entering that space as a software engineer. No real experience in robotics though.
- DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
  Working on robotics software is still exciting to me, unfortunately that is but a small part of working in the field: supporting operations/customer support is something that can take a lot of your time due to a multitude of factors (lack of specialized knowledge, bad designs, bad components/suppliers that are hard to move away from, environmental issues that can take some investigation to uncover, etc.), handling the expectations from (usually not technical) management can be challenging as well. Projects are usually complex in part due to having a lot of moving parts (hw, sw, mechanical), iterating (bad) designs/components is not practical due to support reasons, so you may be stuck with a known bad stack. And copying a previous comment from me on another thread: Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG (which is a small pool). Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. Overall I would say that if you are optmizing for money / career mobility robotics is not great and you can do better some place else.
tonyarkles 3y ago
Last week I stumbled onto a bug in a sensing system that has lived in our codebase for at least 16 months and wasn’t ever triggered. In being vague but the system has been used pretty heavily in a whole bunch of different environments attached to several different host (mechanical) machines. What tickled it? A counter wraparound in 3rd-party FPGA logic at exactly the wrong moment. And per Murphy’s law, it happened for the first observed time in a relatively high-stakes situation while there were a lot of eyes on it. Naturally.
- DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
  I feel you. This week we found a race condition induced segmentation fault in our lidar drivers (by Sick) that have always been there and the only reason we came across it was because we had to customize them and increase the poll frequency for a specific use case. Like you, high visibility and during a crunch.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  AKA the demo effect: if you want to show something working (like to a customer, investor, boss), it won't. If you want to show something not working (like to a supplier or co-worker for refund/debugging), it will.

lukan 3y ago

"every robot will suck compared to a human doing the same task, but that's what we compare it to every time" What about a factory robot, welding together a part of a car?

DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
That would fall under the "automation" category: a very specialized customized application of robotics, doing the same set of tasks over and over, this is the kind of application where we can really see the power of robotics, but rest assured that countless hours were spent testing/improving/optimizing/safe guarding these workflows and after every section in an assembly line there will be manual inspection to flag for bad / missing weldings and potential service of the machinery involved.
- gertlex 3y ago
  Would "single purpose robot" be another reasonable term for welding robots? Just musing. The earlier "when compared to humans" statement definitely sounds pretty accurate to me, worded as "mutli-purpose robots currently always are less robust than humans at the same set of tasks" (or similar)
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >mutli-purpose robots currently always are less robust than humans at the same set of tasks Specialization has tradeoffs. Humans are very optimized generalists but very few of us become specialist at more than one thing. Even in that case a specialized machine/robot can be far faster, depending on the task of course. Of course humans have a lot of trade offs for their abilities as generalists... taking years to mature, requiring sleep, poor integration with computer systems are just some of them.
stonemetal12 3y ago
Those aren't robots they are industrial automation. :) As soon as it gets practical it stops being robotics.
- ska 3y ago
  > As soon as it gets practical it stops being robotics. This idea co-evolved in "AI"
- hugs 3y ago
  A potential corollary: As soon is gets practical, it also stops looking like a robot. Once you know how many degrees of freedom are truly needed to solve a problem, you start removing unnecessary parts in the design to lower cost and assembly complexity. Thus, once your cool new C-3PO has perfected the art of making toast, it's only a matter of time until you re-engineer it into looking like a toaster.
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    No, I don't think so. We already have toasters, robots are for the tasks that can't be done by such simple machines.
    - lukan 3y ago
      A toaster cannot make a toast alone. It has to be inserted and removed and put on a plate. That's what I want a robot for (one day, after I am sure, it will not accidently toast me).
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        The question is, is this actually worth it over a toaster with climate-controlled toast-hopper that dispenses directly onto a clean plate from a plate dispenser. And if that feels too expensive and space-intensive for mere toast, just think of how much worse a robot would be!
    - DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago

dlivingston 3y ago

Do you like working in robotics? How is the work, pay, environment, and industry? I've entertained the idea of entering that space as a software engineer. No real experience in robotics though.

DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
Working on robotics software is still exciting to me, unfortunately that is but a small part of working in the field: supporting operations/customer support is something that can take a lot of your time due to a multitude of factors (lack of specialized knowledge, bad designs, bad components/suppliers that are hard to move away from, environmental issues that can take some investigation to uncover, etc.), handling the expectations from (usually not technical) management can be challenging as well. Projects are usually complex in part due to having a lot of moving parts (hw, sw, mechanical), iterating (bad) designs/components is not practical due to support reasons, so you may be stuck with a known bad stack. And copying a previous comment from me on another thread: Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG (which is a small pool). Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. Overall I would say that if you are optmizing for money / career mobility robotics is not great and you can do better some place else.

tonyarkles 3y ago

Last week I stumbled onto a bug in a sensing system that has lived in our codebase for at least 16 months and wasn’t ever triggered. In being vague but the system has been used pretty heavily in a whole bunch of different environments attached to several different host (mechanical) machines. What tickled it? A counter wraparound in 3rd-party FPGA logic at exactly the wrong moment. And per Murphy’s law, it happened for the first observed time in a relatively high-stakes situation while there were a lot of eyes on it. Naturally.

DoctorDabadedoo 3y ago
I feel you. This week we found a race condition induced segmentation fault in our lidar drivers (by Sick) that have always been there and the only reason we came across it was because we had to customize them and increase the poll frequency for a specific use case. Like you, high visibility and during a crunch.
rcxdude 3y ago
AKA the demo effect: if you want to show something working (like to a customer, investor, boss), it won't. If you want to show something not working (like to a supplier or co-worker for refund/debugging), it will.