8 ms·

The obstacles to scaling up humanoids

51 points by voxadam 1y ago

chmod775 1y ago
I'm so confused why you would use a laughably bad human when you could have a specialist robot. These things are going to get outperformed by the latter even more so than humans would. I'm not surprised at all they're struggling to find buyers.
- Daneel_ 1y ago
  If you can have one robot do multiple tasks at 80% of the capability of a special-purpose robot, then that’s a win. Buy a fleet of them and just repurpose them as necessary. If they’re humanoid then they can already use tools, equipment, and access methods we already use for ourselves. What part of the vision doesn’t make sense?
  - chmod775 1y ago
    Then they're just a worse human on every metric: from capability to real cost. When these things can make a burger without help I'll change mind, but right now they're not even close to that. Everything I've seen so far makes them look like clumsy pieces of junk. I haven't even seen one make a sandwich without a human having to prepare every step for them so they could then perform "cutting motion" or "stack ingredients" (painfully slowly and shaking like a geriatric).
    - TheDudeMan 1y ago
      You know they're getting better, right?
      - elzbardico 1y ago
        Like fusion power reactor are, and have been for a long time?
        TheDudeMan 1y ago
        No, I never said that.
      - chmod775 1y ago
        Once they're good enough, I'm sure they will be used somewhere. These aren't. They're not even ten percent there. I don't get why you'd try to mass-produce and market them. Tesla is going to have proper autonomous driving in their consumer vehicles before they make one useful humanoid robot.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
        That's the part I find frustrating as well. The Optimus demos I've seen show a product that is far, far, far from ready for prime time while Musk and others act like it's amazingly capable. The recent clip posted by Marc Benioff was...painful. It took a few seconds to reply to a simple greeting. Its next bit of speech in response to a query of where to get a Coke has a weird moment where it seems like it interrupts itself. Optimus offers to take Benioff to the kitchen to get a Coke. Optimus acknowledges Benioff's affirmative response, but just stands there. Then you hear Musk in the background muttering that Optimus is "paranoid" about the space. Benioff backs up a few feet. Optimus slowly turns then begins shuffling forward. Is it headed to the kitchen? Who knows! The reaction to that should not be "OMG I cannot wait to pay you $200-$500k for one of these!" It should be "You want HOW MUCH for THIS? Are you nuts?"
        TheDudeMan 1y ago
        OK, so you do get the vision.
    - xandrius 1y ago
      Except: - No pain - No breaks - No protesting/strikes - No rises needed - No happiness to take care of All things business find annoying.
      - numpad0 1y ago
        They're going to have lots of downtimes and constant raises. Human joint longevity is insanely long by standards of robotics, and supplier costs only go up.
      - iamleppert 1y ago
        Instead of a large group of low power, easily manipulatable and controllable workforce, you will have traded for a small group of very powerful, wealthy and influential business and tech people who now fully control the production of your labor. I'd be very worried if I was that business, in terms of the control that company would now wield over me. They could release a software update and disable your entire workforce unless you agreed to pay more money. They could slow your workforce down to prop up a competitor, etc.
        whiplash451 1y ago
        It will likely end like cloud computing. So, not amazing, but certainly not what you describe. Your current cloud provider can absolutely "release a software update and disable your entire workforce unless you agreed to pay more money". The reason why they don't is quite obvious (competition).
    - sandworm101 1y ago
      Dont look at the robot making the sandwich at a restaurant. Look at the robots already being used at food processing facilities. The robots are already doing it, they just dont look like robots. My dishwasher also doesnt look anything like a hired dishwasher. https://youtu.be/U2sN5g6wOBU https://youtu.be/U2sN5g6wOBU
      - chmod775 1y ago
        I explicitly said they're going to get outperformed by specialist robots, just like the humans they poorly imitate sometimes are. That was my entire point!
    - zerotolerance 1y ago
      Nobody is buying them today. But these shaky clumsy versions didn't exist even a few years ago. The hype promises these things tomorrow, which is obvious BS. But the better they look today the more investment will be poured into their R&D which accelerates real improvement, which accelerates investment, etc. Generalist robotics are all about minimizing or at least front loading some portion of retooling cost, minimizing overhead associated with safety and compliance, and being able to capitalize what would have otherwise been human opex. Those pressures aren't going anywhere.
    - Daneel_ 1y ago
      Well sure, but you asked about the vision not the current state. I have very little doubt that they’ll be making burgers within 10 years. The hardware is already capable I think - it’s mostly just a software problem now.
      - chmod775 1y ago
        It's not remotely capable enough. There's a reason you never see one of these things cut something soft like a tomato into even slices (or at all). Their extremely clumsy fingers/hands can pretty much just open and close. I have doubts they could even fasten a screw using any kind of screwdriver, given the hardware's overall lack of precision and degrees of freedom in their digits. They have about enough degrees of freedom to grip most things, but not enough to manipulate (such as rotate) something like a screwdriver they are already holding. Some sources claim they can be precise to within around 1 newton with their grip force - this does not include the additional error introduced by the rest of the robot the hand is attached to. This is relevant if they're holding something that is also pressed against a cutting-board. Best case for them is simply holding an object without having to exert further control, since they have some sort of clutch mechanism that decouples the motors and essentially locks their fingers in place. That gets rid of the shaking you'd otherwise see when they have to exert continuous motor effort. You do not have that luxury when you are manipulating something soft, such as when cutting a tomato, or when you're trying to turn a screwdriver in your hands. We can deduce they are at least an order of magnitude off human precision, likely multiple. These things are not going to cut tomatoes into something you'd put onto a sandwich or burger, then sell to customers, any time soon.
        Daneel_ 1y ago
        The gen 3 hand from Optimus (Tesla) has 22 degrees of freedom in the hand and 3 in the wrist - it's more than capable of twisting a screwdriver or holding a knife well enough to cut a tomato. Like I said, it's a software problem - there's a reason the optimus robots are being tele-operated at their demos. The hardware is capable enough, it's just that the control software isn't up to the task yet.
  - schwartzworld 1y ago
    > If you can have one robot do multiple tasks at 80% of the capability of a special-purpose robot What does them being humanoid have to do with this? There are other form factors that could get to 80% but might be simpler to implement.
    - BurningFrog 1y ago
      The whole point of humaniod robots is that they can work in environments designed for humans. And the world is already full of those! If that ends up being a dominant or niche part of the robot market is way too early to predict.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      And what would that "other form factor" be? Can that "other form factor" climb stairs? Or operate existing power tools? Or get into a generic car to get transported to a new workplace? Or get teleoperated by a human with mocap gloves? Non-humanoid robots don't get simplicity for free. They have to trade off capabilities to get there.
      - schwartzworld 1y ago
        OP mentioned a standard of being able to do 80% of human activities. You might need human legs to climb stairs, but then again, if you work in a building with elevators, that might be a pretty simple tradeoff to make. > Or operate existing power tools? Or get teleoperated by a human with mocap gloves? Requires grippers that can hold in a similar way to human hands. > Or get into a generic car to get transported to a new workplace? My dog can do this and traverse a flight of stairs, and she is decidedly not humanoid.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        So, a dog body, but with a pair of humanlike hands attached? I fail to see how that would be any less complex than making a humanoid frame in the first place.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  "The vision" is that instead of building 9999 specialist robots for 9999 different tasks, you mass produce one robot model that can do all of them. Less efficiently, sure, but for the manufacturing, logistics, maintenance? The economies of scale are immense. The reason why we weren't doing exactly that back in the 80s isn't that universal humanoid robots somehow weren't desirable. It's that for a universal humanoid hardware to be useful, you need a fairly universal AI to back it. That "universal AI" was nowhere to be seen back in the 80s, or the 90s, or the 00s. Now, we finally have a good idea of how to build the kind of AI required for it.
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    The question is how much less efficiently. The point on which it all hinges is that it needs to be a little less efficiently, but the reality is probably that it's so much less that it's no longer really viable. Like, Digit costs a quarter mil and is rated for 10 thousand hours. It can stack boxes. For that price you can turn every box in your warehouse into an AGV and they'll last you forever.
  - 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
    But then you need one robot that's got 9,999 specializations. A human can't actually do 10,000 things. You need 10,000 humans, each that goes through a specialization process (training, developing muscle memory, etc) that builds both physiology and mental capability specific to the skill. Not only does the robot need to be capable of every incredibly difficult physical skill we learn, it needs a matching program. It's impossible to do this in a general way. This could theoretically be scalable (produce the robot and have 10,000 companies all develop their own specialization routines), but the hardware (both the parts as well as neural interface) needs to be as capable as a human body, which isn't even remotely true. The physical robot will always limit what skills it can learn, on top of the difficulty of programming the skill. I think we're hundreds of years away from making a robot that's as capable as a human. We would get there faster with synthetics or cyborgs. Create a human body without a brain, use Neuralink to operate it. Until then, specialized robots are the only thing that will scale to 10,000 skills.
    - 1y ago
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  I think the reasoning is that the world is built for humans, so if you need a robot to do arbitrary human tasks in an unmodified environment then perhaps that gives an advantage. The premise itself seems bogus though - there's plenty of tasks such as traditional assembly line and conveyor belt automation where a stable robot bolted to the floor, with a wired power source and custom manipulators is going to be a much better option. For a mobile robot stability and reliability are key, and it's hard to see how a humanoid robot would be anything other than a massive downgrade for applications like Amazon's warehouse robots, hospital drug delivery robots, mall security robots, robot vacuum cleaners, etc. Wheels for the win. OTOH there's the dream/hype of a domestic robot doing all your household chores, where humanoid form might actually be a plus, but at this point that's a pipe dream, and I seriously doubt many people really want C-3PO in the kitchen washing the dishes even if he is managing to do it without breaking anything or short-circuiting himself. It's like a 60's vision of the future, with people in flying cars or living on mars. No product-market fit.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  They're struggling to find buyers because they can't do anything useful _today_. For the price of a car it's obviously hard to find early adopters.
Animats 1y ago
Look at it this way. Useful Humanoid robots are at least as hard as useful self-driving cars. It took about 20 years to get from the DARPA Grand Challenge (can drive OK on an empty road) to Waymo (take one across town today.).
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  It’s actually going faster because it does not require public approval the same way that driving cars do because you’re in public space. We’re seeing a lot of robotic trials happening in private warehouses and on private test ranges at pretty rapid scale Beyond that the methods for transfer learning behavior cloning behavior authoring are very robust so that I can get joint angles directly from a human via instrumentation through vision or even commodity sensors which captured trajectories that can be immediately applied to robotic joint positions. The real challenge is actually capturing demonstration recordings from humans because it’s the hardest thing to instrument. The core task is instrumenting data capture of existing human tasks that are not done through machines, such that they can transfer to machines. This is easiest done with existing human operated robots because the instrumentation is free, so data can go directly into real2sim2real pipelines. There might seem counterintuitive but most of the actual technical bits and bites are already there it’s re-orienting the economic and logistical process of labor execution that is the major challenge. I will say though, I’m seeing less and less barriers there as time goes on. Employers really want to not have to hand human employees
  - SequoiaHope 1y ago
    Municipal approval was probably only a minor part of the development time tho no? Google was operating Waymo in Mountain View for years before they expanded. The vast majority of the time cost was in development. I think technology development can be faster thanks to better AI systems like VLA models, but I do think the time to real deployment will be long. My pet issue is that the dexterity of the hands is still really poor. A human hand is incredible with what it can do. I think between the general manipulation tasks, world understanding, and more these systems are still a long ways out for widespread use, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they find niche uses near term.
onetokeoverthe 1y ago
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Lapra 1y ago
Humanoid robots are probably never coming. The fact is - flesh and blood humans pay for their own upkeep. Wear-and-tear, particularly on a heavy lifting robot, would probably be their biggest cost and might always outweigh the cost savings.
- qgin 1y ago
  I think it depends on the application. Employees tend to not be free in the 21st century at least.
- b112 1y ago
  We can make things that last for decades, we just choose not to. Planned obsolescence is a business strategy, as is rapid breakdown of things we buy. A generic example, fridges could easily last 40 to 50 years without maintenance. They wouldn't be all that more expensive either. Volvo, and the B-52 bomber program showed this, with Volvo having some models unchanged for 20 years. The B-52 has been in service longer than most people have been alive. Each time an early wear or failure point is found in the B-52, it is documented, fixed, and rolled out to all B-52s. Their ancient, but more reliable than newer bombers and require less maintenance. We could do this for everything. Design a fridge, and after 10 years collect the failures and see how they broke. Keep selling the same fridge, the same parts, and eventually it's a rock. We don't do this, companies don't do this, because it's not best for profit. So my point is robot maintenance could be minor, and if it was purely a lease model, would remain minor... because the company would profit from lower overall maintenance costs. Lastly, compare a robot to a car driving 100s of thousands of KM. I've driven new cars to 150000km with almost no failure of any kind (except brakes. tires). So maybe not as bad as thought.
  - rimunroe 1y ago
    > A generic example, fridges could easily last 40 to 50 years without maintenance. They wouldn't be all that more expensive either. Volvo, and the B-52 bomber program showed this, with Volvo having some models unchanged for 20 years. The B-52 has been in service longer than most people have been alive. B-52s require regular inspections and maintenance just like any other aircraft. A fridge is less complicated, but it's still a machine. Even my grandfather's clock needed some work done every couple decades, and it didn't contain refrigerant, a compressor, fans, or have to deal with condensation.
deleted 1y ago
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wolttam 1y ago
Completely unsold on this take. The pace of development in China can't be ignored. The consumer market for a pretty dumb household chore bot is huge.
- robots0only 1y ago
  and so is the safety margin for a humanoid. The consumer market is huge only if the robots are highly reliable and work very well both of which are not true at the moment. Things will change but it will take quite a bit of time and much more research.
  - jpace121 1y ago
    Is the demand there at the price point and reliability levels that are currently possible?
  - Symmetry 1y ago
    Safety stops are much more challenging in a robot that tends to fall over without active balancing. Though with ISO 25785-1 in progress maybe there'll be a workable humanoid robot safety standard in a few years.
    - omnicognate 1y ago
      Interesting, hadn't heard of ISO 25785-1. It appears to be for industrial robots, though, and explicitly excludes "mobile robots intended for consumer or household use".
- numpad0 1y ago
  They're all dog bots adapted to stand on back legs. None are true humanoids in the first place, none of them even have articulating pelvis.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  I own at least three! Dishwasher, laundy washer, laundry dryer... I would get a roomba but it can't do enough fine detail to be worth it.
OhMeadhbh 1y ago
The "S" in "Humanoid Robot" is for "Safety."
- CharlesW 1y ago
  What's the worst that could happen? https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/humans https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/humans
adamwong246 1y ago
if only battery tech had kept pace with Moore's law
- mandevil 1y ago
  Moore's Law was primarily a tool for arguing with finance guys to let you borrow the enormous amount of money to build the new fab- see, this law says that if you don't let us raise the money, then the other company will- see this straight line? It's inevitable, so give us the money. We could have chosen that scale of investment in battery technology, certainly, but the finance guys said that it wasn't profitable to invest that much in it. China was willing to invest into this field for national security reasons (the threat was of the USN cutting off oil traffic in the Indian Ocean, well beyond the range of the Chinese military). Semiconductors themselves were the result of (US) national security investment- the Minuteman ICBM guidance system was the first large scale use of IC semiconductors. Given how quickly battery technology has advanced- and how profitable it has been to build these factories- I think the evidence is that the finance guys were wrong about the profitability and importance of battery research/construction, and the national security investment jump-started the whole thing, just like with semiconductors.
- tim333 1y ago
  There's been a bit of a falling cost exponential https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline not quite Moore's but a big part of why we have ebikes, ecars etc.
ozten 1y ago
This is a superficial article. The biggest bottlenecks are raw ingredients, power, and factories. Once the automated manufacturing flywheel gets started, units can be produced very rapidly. Specialized machines produce low-level components, while more generalized machines assemble higher-level components as well as products like themselves and other robots. People don't factor a human's total compensation beyond an hourly wage. Machines don't need as much breathing room as humans. Machines can work a 6-day, 16-hour schedule.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Article calls out demand — so far there has been no demand for large numbers of humanoid robots.
  - rapsey 1y ago
    And it is a dumb take. As with any new technology, it has a chicken and an egg problem to overcome. Humanoid robots are developing very rapidly now that AI is progressing the way it is. It is in the same vane as 32k should be enough for anybody.
- blacksmith_tb 1y ago
  Can't machines work a 7-day, 24-hour schedule? That said, humanoid robots strike me as a jack-of-all-trades tool, our environment is full of things that are optimized for human-sized and -shaped users, but if you can purpose-build your robot for a factory, it's going to be more efficient at a narrow set of tasks there.
  - ozten 1y ago
    That is the humanoid robot use case with time for charging, maintenance, and offline during repair. This is just a rough estimate of amortizing those costs and comparing them against a 7-day work week.
- didibus 1y ago
  Isn't the biggest bottleneck just that they need to adequately and reliably be able to do useful work at a better price-performance ratio than a human ? And that's just not the case yet?
JKCalhoun 1y ago
We have Roombas. I saw a number of Husqvarna lawn robots in Sweden (I've seen none in the U.S. so far). But neither of these are exactly flying off the shelves. Humanoid robots feel like they're decades away for being something people would want.
- rapsey 1y ago
  > But neither of these are exactly flying off the shelves. Roombas and lawn robots are all extremely popular.
  - jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
    Robot vacuums are popular but maybe they were referring to the iRobot brand, which is rapidly failing.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  I have vacuum robots. I'm considering a lawn robot. My suburban city has two large ones mowing the parks, had never heard of them previously. Mostly worried about pets and critters.
- nradov 1y ago
  I've owned several Roomba type robots, both actual Roombas and competing brands. None of them have really saved any time or labor. They always get stuck under furniture or tangled on charger cables. They don't work on stairs. And clearing dog hair from the roller is a huge hassle. I fully expect to still be paying a human cleaning service decades from now.
  - ajdude 1y ago
    > I fully expect to still be paying a human cleaning service decades from now. I'm curious if a cleaning service wasn't an option, would the Roomba be worth the saved time compared to doing the cleaning yourself? I also own a Roomba, but I don't have a cleaning service so my options are either do 100% of the cleaning or let the Roomba do its thing and manually take care of the difference. For me it's just one less room I have to sweep.
EcommerceFlow 1y ago
I think the article understates the demand a robot would have for even just simple household tasks like folding laundry.
stackedinserter 1y ago
Comments in this post will age like milk.
Ronomics 1y ago
I think these will be hurdled sooner than people think. Every obstacle has been successfully hurdled as of now, just not in one single robot. Every robot right now has pros and cons due to production needs. Robot good at one thing may not have dexterous hands or robots rushed to be manufactured like the g1 were shipped more as cool commodities than anything useful.

51 points by voxadam 1y ago

I'm so confused why you would use a laughably bad human when you could have a specialist robot. These things are going to get outperformed by the latter even more so than humans would. I'm not surprised at all they're struggling to find buyers.

Daneel_ 1y ago
If you can have one robot do multiple tasks at 80% of the capability of a special-purpose robot, then that’s a win. Buy a fleet of them and just repurpose them as necessary. If they’re humanoid then they can already use tools, equipment, and access methods we already use for ourselves. What part of the vision doesn’t make sense?
- chmod775 1y ago
  Then they're just a worse human on every metric: from capability to real cost. When these things can make a burger without help I'll change mind, but right now they're not even close to that. Everything I've seen so far makes them look like clumsy pieces of junk. I haven't even seen one make a sandwich without a human having to prepare every step for them so they could then perform "cutting motion" or "stack ingredients" (painfully slowly and shaking like a geriatric).
  - TheDudeMan 1y ago
    You know they're getting better, right?
    - elzbardico 1y ago
      Like fusion power reactor are, and have been for a long time?
      - TheDudeMan 1y ago
        No, I never said that.
    - chmod775 1y ago
      Once they're good enough, I'm sure they will be used somewhere. These aren't. They're not even ten percent there. I don't get why you'd try to mass-produce and market them. Tesla is going to have proper autonomous driving in their consumer vehicles before they make one useful humanoid robot.
      - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
        That's the part I find frustrating as well. The Optimus demos I've seen show a product that is far, far, far from ready for prime time while Musk and others act like it's amazingly capable. The recent clip posted by Marc Benioff was...painful. It took a few seconds to reply to a simple greeting. Its next bit of speech in response to a query of where to get a Coke has a weird moment where it seems like it interrupts itself. Optimus offers to take Benioff to the kitchen to get a Coke. Optimus acknowledges Benioff's affirmative response, but just stands there. Then you hear Musk in the background muttering that Optimus is "paranoid" about the space. Benioff backs up a few feet. Optimus slowly turns then begins shuffling forward. Is it headed to the kitchen? Who knows! The reaction to that should not be "OMG I cannot wait to pay you $200-$500k for one of these!" It should be "You want HOW MUCH for THIS? Are you nuts?"
      - TheDudeMan 1y ago
        OK, so you do get the vision.
  - xandrius 1y ago
    Except: - No pain - No breaks - No protesting/strikes - No rises needed - No happiness to take care of All things business find annoying.
    - numpad0 1y ago
      They're going to have lots of downtimes and constant raises. Human joint longevity is insanely long by standards of robotics, and supplier costs only go up.
    - iamleppert 1y ago
      Instead of a large group of low power, easily manipulatable and controllable workforce, you will have traded for a small group of very powerful, wealthy and influential business and tech people who now fully control the production of your labor. I'd be very worried if I was that business, in terms of the control that company would now wield over me. They could release a software update and disable your entire workforce unless you agreed to pay more money. They could slow your workforce down to prop up a competitor, etc.
      - whiplash451 1y ago
        It will likely end like cloud computing. So, not amazing, but certainly not what you describe. Your current cloud provider can absolutely "release a software update and disable your entire workforce unless you agreed to pay more money". The reason why they don't is quite obvious (competition).
  - sandworm101 1y ago
    Dont look at the robot making the sandwich at a restaurant. Look at the robots already being used at food processing facilities. The robots are already doing it, they just dont look like robots. My dishwasher also doesnt look anything like a hired dishwasher. https://youtu.be/U2sN5g6wOBU https://youtu.be/U2sN5g6wOBU
    - chmod775 1y ago
      I explicitly said they're going to get outperformed by specialist robots, just like the humans they poorly imitate sometimes are. That was my entire point!
  - zerotolerance 1y ago
    Nobody is buying them today. But these shaky clumsy versions didn't exist even a few years ago. The hype promises these things tomorrow, which is obvious BS. But the better they look today the more investment will be poured into their R&D which accelerates real improvement, which accelerates investment, etc. Generalist robotics are all about minimizing or at least front loading some portion of retooling cost, minimizing overhead associated with safety and compliance, and being able to capitalize what would have otherwise been human opex. Those pressures aren't going anywhere.
  - Daneel_ 1y ago
    Well sure, but you asked about the vision not the current state. I have very little doubt that they’ll be making burgers within 10 years. The hardware is already capable I think - it’s mostly just a software problem now.
    - chmod775 1y ago
      It's not remotely capable enough. There's a reason you never see one of these things cut something soft like a tomato into even slices (or at all). Their extremely clumsy fingers/hands can pretty much just open and close. I have doubts they could even fasten a screw using any kind of screwdriver, given the hardware's overall lack of precision and degrees of freedom in their digits. They have about enough degrees of freedom to grip most things, but not enough to manipulate (such as rotate) something like a screwdriver they are already holding. Some sources claim they can be precise to within around 1 newton with their grip force - this does not include the additional error introduced by the rest of the robot the hand is attached to. This is relevant if they're holding something that is also pressed against a cutting-board. Best case for them is simply holding an object without having to exert further control, since they have some sort of clutch mechanism that decouples the motors and essentially locks their fingers in place. That gets rid of the shaking you'd otherwise see when they have to exert continuous motor effort. You do not have that luxury when you are manipulating something soft, such as when cutting a tomato, or when you're trying to turn a screwdriver in your hands. We can deduce they are at least an order of magnitude off human precision, likely multiple. These things are not going to cut tomatoes into something you'd put onto a sandwich or burger, then sell to customers, any time soon.
      - Daneel_ 1y ago
        The gen 3 hand from Optimus (Tesla) has 22 degrees of freedom in the hand and 3 in the wrist - it's more than capable of twisting a screwdriver or holding a knife well enough to cut a tomato. Like I said, it's a software problem - there's a reason the optimus robots are being tele-operated at their demos. The hardware is capable enough, it's just that the control software isn't up to the task yet.
- schwartzworld 1y ago
  > If you can have one robot do multiple tasks at 80% of the capability of a special-purpose robot What does them being humanoid have to do with this? There are other form factors that could get to 80% but might be simpler to implement.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    The whole point of humaniod robots is that they can work in environments designed for humans. And the world is already full of those! If that ends up being a dominant or niche part of the robot market is way too early to predict.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    And what would that "other form factor" be? Can that "other form factor" climb stairs? Or operate existing power tools? Or get into a generic car to get transported to a new workplace? Or get teleoperated by a human with mocap gloves? Non-humanoid robots don't get simplicity for free. They have to trade off capabilities to get there.
    - schwartzworld 1y ago
      OP mentioned a standard of being able to do 80% of human activities. You might need human legs to climb stairs, but then again, if you work in a building with elevators, that might be a pretty simple tradeoff to make. > Or operate existing power tools? Or get teleoperated by a human with mocap gloves? Requires grippers that can hold in a similar way to human hands. > Or get into a generic car to get transported to a new workplace? My dog can do this and traverse a flight of stairs, and she is decidedly not humanoid.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        So, a dog body, but with a pair of humanlike hands attached? I fail to see how that would be any less complex than making a humanoid frame in the first place.
ACCount37 1y ago
"The vision" is that instead of building 9999 specialist robots for 9999 different tasks, you mass produce one robot model that can do all of them. Less efficiently, sure, but for the manufacturing, logistics, maintenance? The economies of scale are immense. The reason why we weren't doing exactly that back in the 80s isn't that universal humanoid robots somehow weren't desirable. It's that for a universal humanoid hardware to be useful, you need a fairly universal AI to back it. That "universal AI" was nowhere to be seen back in the 80s, or the 90s, or the 00s. Now, we finally have a good idea of how to build the kind of AI required for it.
- moffkalast 1y ago
  The question is how much less efficiently. The point on which it all hinges is that it needs to be a little less efficiently, but the reality is probably that it's so much less that it's no longer really viable. Like, Digit costs a quarter mil and is rated for 10 thousand hours. It can stack boxes. For that price you can turn every box in your warehouse into an AGV and they'll last you forever.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  But then you need one robot that's got 9,999 specializations. A human can't actually do 10,000 things. You need 10,000 humans, each that goes through a specialization process (training, developing muscle memory, etc) that builds both physiology and mental capability specific to the skill. Not only does the robot need to be capable of every incredibly difficult physical skill we learn, it needs a matching program. It's impossible to do this in a general way. This could theoretically be scalable (produce the robot and have 10,000 companies all develop their own specialization routines), but the hardware (both the parts as well as neural interface) needs to be as capable as a human body, which isn't even remotely true. The physical robot will always limit what skills it can learn, on top of the difficulty of programming the skill. I think we're hundreds of years away from making a robot that's as capable as a human. We would get there faster with synthetics or cyborgs. Create a human body without a brain, use Neuralink to operate it. Until then, specialized robots are the only thing that will scale to 10,000 skills.
  - 1y ago
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
I think the reasoning is that the world is built for humans, so if you need a robot to do arbitrary human tasks in an unmodified environment then perhaps that gives an advantage. The premise itself seems bogus though - there's plenty of tasks such as traditional assembly line and conveyor belt automation where a stable robot bolted to the floor, with a wired power source and custom manipulators is going to be a much better option. For a mobile robot stability and reliability are key, and it's hard to see how a humanoid robot would be anything other than a massive downgrade for applications like Amazon's warehouse robots, hospital drug delivery robots, mall security robots, robot vacuum cleaners, etc. Wheels for the win. OTOH there's the dream/hype of a domestic robot doing all your household chores, where humanoid form might actually be a plus, but at this point that's a pipe dream, and I seriously doubt many people really want C-3PO in the kitchen washing the dishes even if he is managing to do it without breaking anything or short-circuiting himself. It's like a 60's vision of the future, with people in flying cars or living on mars. No product-market fit.
stackedinserter 1y ago
They're struggling to find buyers because they can't do anything useful _today_. For the price of a car it's obviously hard to find early adopters.

Animats 1y ago

Look at it this way. Useful Humanoid robots are at least as hard as useful self-driving cars. It took about 20 years to get from the DARPA Grand Challenge (can drive OK on an empty road) to Waymo (take one across town today.).

AndrewKemendo 1y ago
It’s actually going faster because it does not require public approval the same way that driving cars do because you’re in public space. We’re seeing a lot of robotic trials happening in private warehouses and on private test ranges at pretty rapid scale Beyond that the methods for transfer learning behavior cloning behavior authoring are very robust so that I can get joint angles directly from a human via instrumentation through vision or even commodity sensors which captured trajectories that can be immediately applied to robotic joint positions. The real challenge is actually capturing demonstration recordings from humans because it’s the hardest thing to instrument. The core task is instrumenting data capture of existing human tasks that are not done through machines, such that they can transfer to machines. This is easiest done with existing human operated robots because the instrumentation is free, so data can go directly into real2sim2real pipelines. There might seem counterintuitive but most of the actual technical bits and bites are already there it’s re-orienting the economic and logistical process of labor execution that is the major challenge. I will say though, I’m seeing less and less barriers there as time goes on. Employers really want to not have to hand human employees
- SequoiaHope 1y ago
  Municipal approval was probably only a minor part of the development time tho no? Google was operating Waymo in Mountain View for years before they expanded. The vast majority of the time cost was in development. I think technology development can be faster thanks to better AI systems like VLA models, but I do think the time to real deployment will be long. My pet issue is that the dexterity of the hands is still really poor. A human hand is incredible with what it can do. I think between the general manipulation tasks, world understanding, and more these systems are still a long ways out for widespread use, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they find niche uses near term.

onetokeoverthe 1y ago

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Lapra 1y ago

Humanoid robots are probably never coming. The fact is - flesh and blood humans pay for their own upkeep. Wear-and-tear, particularly on a heavy lifting robot, would probably be their biggest cost and might always outweigh the cost savings.

qgin 1y ago
I think it depends on the application. Employees tend to not be free in the 21st century at least.
b112 1y ago
We can make things that last for decades, we just choose not to. Planned obsolescence is a business strategy, as is rapid breakdown of things we buy. A generic example, fridges could easily last 40 to 50 years without maintenance. They wouldn't be all that more expensive either. Volvo, and the B-52 bomber program showed this, with Volvo having some models unchanged for 20 years. The B-52 has been in service longer than most people have been alive. Each time an early wear or failure point is found in the B-52, it is documented, fixed, and rolled out to all B-52s. Their ancient, but more reliable than newer bombers and require less maintenance. We could do this for everything. Design a fridge, and after 10 years collect the failures and see how they broke. Keep selling the same fridge, the same parts, and eventually it's a rock. We don't do this, companies don't do this, because it's not best for profit. So my point is robot maintenance could be minor, and if it was purely a lease model, would remain minor... because the company would profit from lower overall maintenance costs. Lastly, compare a robot to a car driving 100s of thousands of KM. I've driven new cars to 150000km with almost no failure of any kind (except brakes. tires). So maybe not as bad as thought.
- rimunroe 1y ago
  > A generic example, fridges could easily last 40 to 50 years without maintenance. They wouldn't be all that more expensive either. Volvo, and the B-52 bomber program showed this, with Volvo having some models unchanged for 20 years. The B-52 has been in service longer than most people have been alive. B-52s require regular inspections and maintenance just like any other aircraft. A fridge is less complicated, but it's still a machine. Even my grandfather's clock needed some work done every couple decades, and it didn't contain refrigerant, a compressor, fans, or have to deal with condensation.

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wolttam 1y ago

Completely unsold on this take. The pace of development in China can't be ignored. The consumer market for a pretty dumb household chore bot is huge.

robots0only 1y ago
and so is the safety margin for a humanoid. The consumer market is huge only if the robots are highly reliable and work very well both of which are not true at the moment. Things will change but it will take quite a bit of time and much more research.
- jpace121 1y ago
  Is the demand there at the price point and reliability levels that are currently possible?
- Symmetry 1y ago
  Safety stops are much more challenging in a robot that tends to fall over without active balancing. Though with ISO 25785-1 in progress maybe there'll be a workable humanoid robot safety standard in a few years.
  - omnicognate 1y ago
    Interesting, hadn't heard of ISO 25785-1. It appears to be for industrial robots, though, and explicitly excludes "mobile robots intended for consumer or household use".
numpad0 1y ago
They're all dog bots adapted to stand on back legs. None are true humanoids in the first place, none of them even have articulating pelvis.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
I own at least three! Dishwasher, laundy washer, laundry dryer... I would get a roomba but it can't do enough fine detail to be worth it.

OhMeadhbh 1y ago

The "S" in "Humanoid Robot" is for "Safety."

CharlesW 1y ago
What's the worst that could happen? https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/humans https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/humans

adamwong246 1y ago

if only battery tech had kept pace with Moore's law

mandevil 1y ago
Moore's Law was primarily a tool for arguing with finance guys to let you borrow the enormous amount of money to build the new fab- see, this law says that if you don't let us raise the money, then the other company will- see this straight line? It's inevitable, so give us the money. We could have chosen that scale of investment in battery technology, certainly, but the finance guys said that it wasn't profitable to invest that much in it. China was willing to invest into this field for national security reasons (the threat was of the USN cutting off oil traffic in the Indian Ocean, well beyond the range of the Chinese military). Semiconductors themselves were the result of (US) national security investment- the Minuteman ICBM guidance system was the first large scale use of IC semiconductors. Given how quickly battery technology has advanced- and how profitable it has been to build these factories- I think the evidence is that the finance guys were wrong about the profitability and importance of battery research/construction, and the national security investment jump-started the whole thing, just like with semiconductors.
tim333 1y ago
There's been a bit of a falling cost exponential https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline not quite Moore's but a big part of why we have ebikes, ecars etc.

ozten 1y ago

This is a superficial article. The biggest bottlenecks are raw ingredients, power, and factories. Once the automated manufacturing flywheel gets started, units can be produced very rapidly. Specialized machines produce low-level components, while more generalized machines assemble higher-level components as well as products like themselves and other robots. People don't factor a human's total compensation beyond an hourly wage. Machines don't need as much breathing room as humans. Machines can work a 6-day, 16-hour schedule.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Article calls out demand — so far there has been no demand for large numbers of humanoid robots.
- rapsey 1y ago
  And it is a dumb take. As with any new technology, it has a chicken and an egg problem to overcome. Humanoid robots are developing very rapidly now that AI is progressing the way it is. It is in the same vane as 32k should be enough for anybody.
blacksmith_tb 1y ago
Can't machines work a 7-day, 24-hour schedule? That said, humanoid robots strike me as a jack-of-all-trades tool, our environment is full of things that are optimized for human-sized and -shaped users, but if you can purpose-build your robot for a factory, it's going to be more efficient at a narrow set of tasks there.
- ozten 1y ago
  That is the humanoid robot use case with time for charging, maintenance, and offline during repair. This is just a rough estimate of amortizing those costs and comparing them against a 7-day work week.
didibus 1y ago
Isn't the biggest bottleneck just that they need to adequately and reliably be able to do useful work at a better price-performance ratio than a human ? And that's just not the case yet?

JKCalhoun 1y ago

We have Roombas. I saw a number of Husqvarna lawn robots in Sweden (I've seen none in the U.S. so far). But neither of these are exactly flying off the shelves. Humanoid robots feel like they're decades away for being something people would want.

rapsey 1y ago
> But neither of these are exactly flying off the shelves. Roombas and lawn robots are all extremely popular.
- jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
  Robot vacuums are popular but maybe they were referring to the iRobot brand, which is rapidly failing.
fluidcruft 1y ago
I have vacuum robots. I'm considering a lawn robot. My suburban city has two large ones mowing the parks, had never heard of them previously. Mostly worried about pets and critters.
nradov 1y ago
I've owned several Roomba type robots, both actual Roombas and competing brands. None of them have really saved any time or labor. They always get stuck under furniture or tangled on charger cables. They don't work on stairs. And clearing dog hair from the roller is a huge hassle. I fully expect to still be paying a human cleaning service decades from now.
- ajdude 1y ago
  > I fully expect to still be paying a human cleaning service decades from now. I'm curious if a cleaning service wasn't an option, would the Roomba be worth the saved time compared to doing the cleaning yourself? I also own a Roomba, but I don't have a cleaning service so my options are either do 100% of the cleaning or let the Roomba do its thing and manually take care of the difference. For me it's just one less room I have to sweep.

EcommerceFlow 1y ago

I think the article understates the demand a robot would have for even just simple household tasks like folding laundry.

stackedinserter 1y ago

Comments in this post will age like milk.

Ronomics 1y ago

I think these will be hurdled sooner than people think. Every obstacle has been successfully hurdled as of now, just not in one single robot. Every robot right now has pros and cons due to production needs. Robot good at one thing may not have dexterous hands or robots rushed to be manufactured like the g1 were shipped more as cool commodities than anything useful.