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Filtered for home robots, fast and slow
- ragebol 2y agoHaving worked on home robotics (in university, for RoboCup@Home so nothing commercial), home robots now finally feel really feasible. The breakthroughs from LLMs and other ML technologies could finally bring this dream to reality. I'd gladly pay 10k for a robot to do all the chores at home.
- genmon 2y agoMy take is that this is an opportunity to re-think what chores are, and what white goods are for Like -- let's say you rent (as we all do, increasingly). Instead of buying different special purpose kitchen gadgets, white goods, and cleaning equipment to haul around with you, why not a general purpose robot that does the easy 80% of all chores?
- modeless 2y agoYes, it's an opportunity to simplify the home. You don't need labor saving devices if you don't need to save labor.
- actionfromafar 2y agoHmm… like how smartphones replaced the stereo (badly, but still), Walkman, tape recorder, radio, camera, telephone, etc.
- ragebol 2y agoYou're saying: why buy a dishwasher and a washing machine and a dryer and a vacuum robot etc if you could buy a home robot to do all of those chores by robot-hand?
- Filligree 2y agoThe answer is going to be energy efficiency. Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand.
- ragebol 2y agoUnfortunately, I'm pretty sure most people only care about money efficiency: what choice is cheaper, now and over time.
- Filligree 2y agoThat’ll still be the dishwasher, then.
- Semaphor 2y ago> Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand. Only if used optimally, or the handwashing is very wasteful. There is one study I know of, it was paid for by washing machine manufacturers and has quite a few issues (like not removing outliers). And yes, I measured my usage of water and power. (I’d still get a dishwasher if my kitchen had space for it)
- falcor84 2y agoI think 10k will be out of reach for awhile, but I think we'll start seeing humanoid home robots for ~100k in the next few years. I also think we'll probably see more subscription/leasing of such robots rather than outright ownership.
- jvanderbot 2y agoWhy do people jump all the way to humanoid? That little box with an arm on it would not cost more than 10k, and I'd gladly take one for upstairs and one for downstairs WAY BEFORE I'd buy a 100kg walking steel frame to coexist with my toddlers.
- falcor84 2y agoThe reason I jumped to humanoids is that I think that the fact that they'll be able to learn tasks by imitating us will make them a lot more versatile and cost-effective overall.
- actionfromafar 2y agoIsn’t current training paradigms requiring massive amounts of data? You aren’t going to get that easily from a handful of luxury robots.
- corysama 2y agoCheck out https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo Their plan is to put droids in real homes and remote control them to create the kinds of training data that can’t be faked in a lab. They explain how that works here https://youtu.be/2ccPTpDq05A https://youtu.be/2ccPTpDq05A
- falcor84 2y agoWhy handful? I would assume that domestic robots like that would sell at least as many units as luxury cars - hundreds of thousands a year. In terms of training, there are a lot of current approaches of learning from videos (of which we have a lot) and from synthetic data, which is getting easier to generate. And if they need more data, I would assume that offering a version of such a robot with telemetry at a large discount would be an easy sell for some. In particular, I'd expect there would be a lot of demand for assistants to elderly people.
- genmon 2y agoPost author here Somebody please build me that home defrag robot!
- kqr 2y ago> This robot hand will beat you at rock-paper-scissors 100% of the time. It can recognise a competing hand gesture in 1 millisecond and move its own hand to make the winning gesture to complete at the same time. This is one of those things that is surprisingly un-hard, though I don't claim a 100 % success rate. On a non-competitive level, people tend to open into their choice on the way down. The strategy I use is to look for if their fingers unfurl, and then I immediately fold out scissors. In all other cases I keep a fist. This works because paper is such an obvious shape even early on in the movement. If their fingers go out, they are doing either paper or scissors, which will on average be beaten by scissors. If their fingers don't go out early, it's either scissors or rock, which on average is beaten by rock.
- mhb 2y agoIt's interesting that you are able to do that. I'm surprised that, in the robot version, they implemented cheating with such an elaborate/expensive setup though. Is it news that a computer can react more quickly than we can see? The computer on Jeopardy could also buzz in sooner than people.
- seydor 2y agoWhy don't we hear about billions thrown on robotics companies?
- jvanderbot 2y agoMy honest answer from the "inside" is two things: 1) self-driving cars/trucks has dominated funding (now drones) for too long and 2) iRobot is barely getting by, spooking investors away from household robots. 10 years ago there were startup floor cleaners, warehouse robots, pool scrubbers, all making the news. Now people have tightened up their portfolios a little, I think, and those ideas get less funding behind DoD applications or self-driving stuff.
- 082349872349872 2y agonote that self-driving is included within DoD applications
- seydor 2y agoWhich is weird because we wouldn't need to be driven much if we had capable robots
- modeless 2y agoFigure has raised $754 million with a $2.5B valuation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]