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Is the fact that such robots haven’t hit the market until now due to there being no use for them in the past due to AI not being advanced enough, or only now ar

Is the fact that such robots haven’t hit the market until now due to there being no use for them in the past due to AI not being advanced enough, or only now are motors, sensors and battery tech able to power and run a humanoid effectively? Would building this have been physically infeasible in 2008?

SequoiaHope 2y ago
I would say that the rise of manufacturing in China has had a huge impact on the cost of things like this. There is much more manufacturing capacity in the world today than there was in 2008 and it is more accessible on the lower end. I used to order assembled circuit boards in 2008 through a company called Gold Phoenix in China, and it was expensive and slow. Now I order them through JLCPCB and it is cheap and fast. I have been looking at getting some parts 3D printed in stainless steel and they're gonna cost $34 each even in single quantity. Back in 2008 I guess that would have been $600. Hell, in 2008 the cheapest 3D printer was $25,000. Now a cheap 3D printer is $200. Also, there would not have been any use for a humanoid robot in 2008. We didn't have the software to understand the world. Note for example this XKCD comic and the notion that "identify whether a photo is of a bird" was considered "virtually impossible". https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ General Electric built a walking truck in 1965, where each actuator was manually controlled by a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Truck Robotics has generally been held back by software constraints. Deep neural nets didn't get their start until 2012. In 2008, there would have been no market for a humanoid. This one is being sold as an "agent", a term in this context used to describe something acting based on deep neural networks. That's a viable research area now, but was not in 2008. Honda debuted Asimo in 2000, so the tech was possible. There were just limited uses and the software was really complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO
numpad0 2y ago
It was always software. Humanoid robots could walk up and down stairs and use basic tools, in preprogrammed lab conditions and/or by manual teleoperations since 90s[1], and in theory autonomously since 2010s[2]. Nowadays they just can, thanks to NVIDIA CUDA, but grabbing objects is still sketchy[3]. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEXSqsW6rMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEXSqsW6rMM 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo 3: https://palm-e.github.io/videos/meta/planning_4x_compressed.mp4 https://palm-e.github.io/videos/meta/planning_4x_compressed....

SequoiaHope 2y ago

I would say that the rise of manufacturing in China has had a huge impact on the cost of things like this. There is much more manufacturing capacity in the world today than there was in 2008 and it is more accessible on the lower end. I used to order assembled circuit boards in 2008 through a company called Gold Phoenix in China, and it was expensive and slow. Now I order them through JLCPCB and it is cheap and fast. I have been looking at getting some parts 3D printed in stainless steel and they're gonna cost $34 each even in single quantity. Back in 2008 I guess that would have been $600. Hell, in 2008 the cheapest 3D printer was $25,000. Now a cheap 3D printer is $200. Also, there would not have been any use for a humanoid robot in 2008. We didn't have the software to understand the world. Note for example this XKCD comic and the notion that "identify whether a photo is of a bird" was considered "virtually impossible". https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ General Electric built a walking truck in 1965, where each actuator was manually controlled by a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Truck Robotics has generally been held back by software constraints. Deep neural nets didn't get their start until 2012. In 2008, there would have been no market for a humanoid. This one is being sold as an "agent", a term in this context used to describe something acting based on deep neural networks. That's a viable research area now, but was not in 2008. Honda debuted Asimo in 2000, so the tech was possible. There were just limited uses and the software was really complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO

numpad0 2y ago

It was always software. Humanoid robots could walk up and down stairs and use basic tools, in preprogrammed lab conditions and/or by manual teleoperations since 90s[1], and in theory autonomously since 2010s[2]. Nowadays they just can, thanks to NVIDIA CUDA, but grabbing objects is still sketchy[3]. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEXSqsW6rMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEXSqsW6rMM 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo 3: https://palm-e.github.io/videos/meta/planning_4x_compressed.mp4 https://palm-e.github.io/videos/meta/planning_4x_compressed....