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I think whenever I see humanoid robots like this: What is the battery life? I imagine this will be a critical limitation on these, until further notice.
by the__alchemist 2y ago
I think whenever I see humanoid robots like this: What is the battery life? I imagine this will be a critical limitation on these, until further notice.
- drooby 2y agoThe battery life of a human is 6-8 hours. Those pesky humans also want "rights". Takes a long time to make a new human too. So that's the competition.
- exe34 2y agoyou can also swap out batteries for the robots
- fragmede 2y agothis robot has arms and legs and apparently some measure of autonomy now as well. It can change it's own batteries! Which, humans do at least once a day, among tending to other biological needs as well. So the question is what's a useful run time if there's a bank of swappable batteries it can run back to refill from? Even if it had to go and swap batteries every two hours, for a factory robot that wouldn't be insurmountable.
- recursive 2y ago> The battery life of a human is 6-8 hours. So that's the competition. How many naps are you taking? Normal uptime is at least 16 hours. In special circumstances, much more is possible. I'd be amazed if the robots are more than 2. Slightly surprised if they're over 1. It's not exactly comparable.
- criley2 2y agoHumans have an uptime of 16 hours, but generally speaking can only operate professionally for an 8 hour span. The other 8 hours are spent mostly doing personal maintenance and refueling their physical and mental capabilities. Oh, and humans have traditionally banded together to punish those who ask for more than 8 hours a day or 5 days a week, and have even historically gotten very murdery over the subject. Buyer beware!
- recursive 2y agoThe comparison does get kind of non-sensical. How much PTO does the robot use? Are they a culture fit? Do they have any insights for process improvement? If robots can replace humans for the most monotonous tasks, I'm all for it, as long as it doesn't hurt living conditions for those humans. But all these robots are only shown to us in very carefully controlled conditions. If a human was doing what we saw this robot doing in a factory, they'd probably get disciplined unless they increased their speed by 400%. This is state of the art, I presume. Maybe this kind of thing will be useful some day, but it feels like that day is a long way off.
- fragmede 2y agoDefinitely controlled, but a pole to the "chest" of Atlas shows it's relatively stable on its feet and capable of recovery, though we have no idea how many takes that took. As far as speed, it depends on what the limitations are. We know electric motors in general are capable of moving faster, so presumably the limits are with computation, to which I'd point out that Moore's law is still hanging on. Compared to Honda's Asimo in 2000 BD's Atlas robot in 2016 was nothing short of phenomenal progress, but that took 16 years. Hopefully it doesn't take another 16, but we'll see. Once there are useful commercially available humanoid robots on the market, progress is likely to accelerate.
- novok 2y agoIf the compute needed is linear, then 4x means it's not far off. I would foresee it in a decade. This speed is also fast enough for household robots as it is.
- devvvvvvv 2y ago> as long as it doesn't hurt living conditions for those humans Literally how would it not? Losing your job hurts your living condition, it's not like the warehouse workers will just be given cushier tasks.
- recursive 2y agoI don't pretend to know all the effects of automation. The industrial revolution seems like it turned out OK.
- the__alchemist 2y agoI do not think you'll get anything close to that with these robots.
- mr_toad 2y ago> Those pesky humans also want "rights". Yep, you’re not allowed to own them, only rent them. And there’s no right to repair if you have a defective unit.
- echoangle 2y agoBut the units actively want to repair themselves, that has to be better than right to repair, right?
- mrshadowgoose 2y agoYup, it's a real shame that batteries can't be swapped.
- Retric 2y agoSwapping batteries is often suggested, but rarely actually used in practice due to a wide range of logistical issues like thermal management, cost, etc.
- fragmede 2y agoHumanoid robots are often suggested, but rarely actually used in practice due to a wide range of issues. When they come to market, they will bring with them new technologies, like power management, humanoid robots, etc.
- arnaudsm 2y agoIt's logistically harder, but it's already common in some industries. Check the Gogoro e-scooter network in Taiwan.
- raldi 2y agoIn many situations, I would imagine an overhead power cable would be feasible.
- modeless 2y agoHumans recharge for 1/3 of the day. That's achievable with batteries. The rest schedule might be a bit different.
- jajko 2y agoWell yes but we can perform 16 hours straight then. If you look at what elite alpinists can do (or more like are rarely forced to do) it can be easily 72 hours full on brutal effort on physical and mental limits, with 0 margin for mistake, no food or water. Not so much case here now I presume. Not that that would be a bummer here nor the baseline, but humans can be properly amazing and we keep stretching the possible further and further.
- modeless 2y agoIt would actually be illegal for a job to be that demanding.
- beAbU 2y agoAre building alpinist robots here? A company might happily have 4 hour shifts to facilitate charging the robot workforce, if that means they dont need to deal with unionizing, smoke-breaking, hung over, late coming, slow working and generally unpleasant humans in their workforce.
- jayd16 2y agoIf they put the charge port in the ear then they can just train it with a video library of humans pulling around corded phones.
- amelius 2y agoOnce we can let the robots build the robots, it doesn't matter really how many robots are charging at any point.