10 ms·
Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
- whatever1 1y agoNot sure if I buy the argument that touch sensitivity is a prerequisite for dexterity. I can put on a thick glove (losing touch and pressure sensitivity all together) and grab a fragile glass without breaking it.
- tired-turtle 1y agoThis is a good point, but I’m not convinced it negates the author’s argument. Consider whether you could pick up that same fragile glass with your eyes closed? I’d wager you could, as you’d still receive (diminished) textile feedback despite the thick gloves.
- kronicum2025 1y agoOnly because of your training otherwise.
- freehorse 1y agoBecause you have learnt it already and you can make predictions. And you don’t lose pressure sensitivity, you still feel the pressure of your hand to the glove, a better example would be using an exoskeleton or robotic arm or inactivate certain nerves. Still you risk more of breaking it imo and you have to be more careful in the beginning until you learn again. Edit: and you probably are not gonna be as fast doing it
- Sevii 1y agoYou don't lose pressure or touch sensitivity from wearing even thick welding gloves. You can still feel how hard you are gripping the rod quite easily.
- ACCount37 1y agoThe same is true for a motor controller.
- nenenejej 1y agoWhat about full control of a claw machine to pick up said glass?
- mikaraento 1y agoDepends heavily on the use case. Indeed many tasks humans carry out are done without touch feedback - but many also require it. An example of feed-forward manipulation is lifting a medium-sized object. Classic example is lifting a coffee cup. If you misjudge a full cup for empty you may spill the contents before your brain manages to replan the action based on sensory input. It takes around 300ms for that feedback loop to happen. We do many thing faster than that would allow. The linked article has a great example of a task where a human needs feedback control: picking up and lighting a match. Sibling comments also make a good point on that touch may well be necessary to learn the task. Babies do a lot of trial-and-error manipulation and even adults will do new tasks slower first.
- ACCount37 1y agoThe industry's approach to "trial and error to learn the task" is to have warehouses of robots perform various tasks until they get good at them. I imagine that you'd rely on warehouses less once you have a real fleet of robots performing real tasks in real world environments (and, at first, failing in many dumb and amusing ways). Robots can also react much faster than 300ms. Sure, that massive transformer you put in charge of high level planning and reasoning probably isn't going to run at 200 tokens a second. But a dozen smaller control-oriented networks that are directly in charge of executing the planned motions can clock at 200 Hz or more. They can adjust fast if motor controllers, which know the position and current draw of any given motor at any given time, report data that indicates the grip is slipping.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoAnd yet, when you pick up a glass expecting it to be full but it turns out to be empty, you'll overdo the motion; part of dexterity is expectations.
- Nevermark 1y ago> Artificial Intelligence researchers have been trying to get [X] to [Y] for over 65 years For 10,000 different problems. A great many of which have been solved in recent years. Robotics is improving at a very fast clip, relative to most tech. I am unaware of any barrier, or any reason to infer there is one, for dextrous robots. I think the primary difference between AI software models and services, and robotic AI, is economics. The cost per task for AI software is .... very small. And the cost per task for a robot with AI is ... many orders of magnitude over that. The marginal costs of serving one more customer are completely incomparable. It's just a push of a button to replace the "fleet" of chatbots a million customers are using. Something unthinkable in the hardware world. The seemingly lower level of effort and progress is because hardware that could operate in our real world with the same dexterity that ChatGPT/Claude can converse online, will be extremely expensive at first. Robotics companies are not just focused on dexterity. They are focused on improvements to dexterity that stay within a very tight economic envelope. Inexpensive dexterity is going to take a while.
- pr337h4m 1y ago> I am unaware of any barrier, or any reason to infer there is one, for dextrous robots. Pretraining data?
- xnx 1y agoSynthetic data works better for robots since you can generate endless scenarios based on real physical laws.
- mikaraento 1y agoDo you know of success stories here? Success of transferring models learned in physics simulation to the real world. When we (ZenRobotics) tried this 15 years ago a big problem was the creation of sufficiently high-fidelity simulated worlds. Gathering statistics and modelling the geometry, brittleness, flexibility, surface texture, friction, variable density etc of a sufficiently large variety of objects was harder than gathering data from the real world.
- avmich 1y agoFails Clark's law?
- Sevii 1y agoVery interesting point that while we've figured out how to digitize images, text and sounds we haven't digitized touch. At best we can describe in words what a touch sensation was like. Smell is in a similar situation. We haven't digitized it at all.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y agoI'm not sure describing it in words is very helpful, and there's probably a good amount of such data available already. I would think the way to do it is build the touch sensors first (and it seems they're getting pretty close) then just tele-operate some robots and collect a ton of data. Either that, or put gloves on humans that can record. Pay people to live their normal lives but with the gloves on.
- davmre 1y agoThere actually has been some recent work on digitizing smell, most notably Osmo, which was founded by some ex-Google ML researchers: https://www.salon.com/2025/01/05/digital-smell-has-arrived-are-we-ready-for-stinkygram/ https://www.salon.com/2025/01/05/digital-smell-has-arrived-a...
- modeless 1y agoTouch is a 2D field of 3D vectors. Easily stored and transmitted as images, and easily processed by neural nets. You could add temperature and pain/damage channels if you want, though they don't seem essential for most manipulation tasks. (Actually I don't believe touch is as essential as he argues anyway. Of course someone who learned a task with touch will struggle without it, but they can still do it and would quickly change strategies and improve.) The problem with touch is making sensors that are cheap and durable and light and thin and repairable and sensitive and shape-conforming. Representation is trivial in comparison.
- rcxdude 1y agoThis, it's a transduction problem (it's difficult to sense and even more difficult to output), not a representation problem.
- 1y ago
- lpolovets 1y agoA cool approach to digitizing touch that I read about a few days ago: https://www.wired.com/story/this-clever-robotic-finger-feels-with-light/ https://www.wired.com/story/this-clever-robotic-finger-feels... (I'm not disagreeing with the author, just sharing an article that is interesting/relevant.)
- rfv6723 1y ago> Before too long (and we already start to see this) humanoid robots will get wheels for feet, at first two, and later maybe more, with nothing that any longer really resembles human legs in gross form. But they will still be called humanoid robots. Totally agree. Wheels are cheaper, more durable and more effective than legs. Human would have wheels if there was an evolution pathway to wheels.
- nine_k 1y agoWheels are great until the robot encounters uneven surfaces, such as a stairway, or a curb. So some kind of stepping functionality would still be necessary.
- cwmoore 1y agoPower to wheel sensors are the paws. Where is the CNS/brain going?
- lvoudour 1y agoWhat would be the evolutionary pressure to grow wheels? They are useless without roads
- cwmoore 1y agoRoads, i think you answered your own question, would be an evolutionary pressure, hypothetically speaking.
- card_zero 1y agoI sometimes imagine wheeled creatures evolving in a location with a big flat hard surface like the Utah salt flats or the Nazca desert, but I guess there's not much reward for being able to roll around since those places are empty as well as flat. Tumbleweed found some success that way though, maybe?
- delusional 1y agoIs there any biological examples of freely rotating power systems? We have nice rotating joints with muscles to provide power, but I can't think of any joint that would allow the sort of free rotation while also producing torque, a wheeled animal would require.
- cornholio 1y agoIn any case, it seems like a "simple" problem to solve. An accelerometer chip costs a few cents and the data rates can be handled by a very light wiring harness, ex I2C. So embedding such a sensor in every rigid component, wiring a single data line to all of them (using the chassis as electrical ground) and feeding the data back to the model seems a trivial way to work around this problem without any kind of real pressure sensitivity. The model knows the inputs it gives to the actuators/servos, so it will quickly learn to predict the free mechanical behavior of the body, and use any deviation to derive data equivalent to pressure and force feedback. Another possible source of data is the driving current of the motors/actuators which is proportional to the mechanical resistance the limb encounters. All sorts of garbage sources of data that were almost useless noise in the classical approach become valuable with a model large enough.
- card_zero 1y ago> they will likely have to collect the both the right data, and learn the right thing. The "bitter lesson" says to stop trying to find simple rules for how to do things - stop trying to understand - and instead to use massive data and massive search to deal with all the incredibly fussy and intractable details magically. But the article here is saying that the lesson is false at its root, because in fact lots of understanding is applied at the point of choosing and sanitising the data. So just throwing noise the model won't do. This doesn't seem to match experience, where information can be gleaned from noise and "garbage sources of data ... become valuable with a model large enough", but maybe there's something illusory about that experience, IDK.
- backprop1989 1y agoIsn’t one of the main functions of the brain / nervous system to “filter” noisy sensory input data to provide a coherent “signal” to perception? Perhaps a smaller or more specialized model could do that if we ended up packing the “skin” of the humanoid with various sensors.
- pixl97 1y ago
- Mistletoe 1y agoHow can I invest in humanoid robot companies now? I do believe this will be tried to be made into the next hype cycle.
- Terr_ 1y agoPshaw, that's nothing, you need to invest in the companies promising to make a Greater Fool robotic investor, now that's where the market'll take off. :P
- slaterbug 1y agoThere's a number of "robotics and embodied AI" ETFs out there that should show up with a quick search. I don't have an opinion as to their quality so you'd have to do your own research.
- svantana 1y agoUnitree is planning to IPO in Q4 of this year, that should be a pretty hot property.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIt's been tried a number of times already though, robotics companies have been around for decades, Sony, Boston Dynamics, Hyundai and many others are already in the space (and some of those are on the stonks market). I don't think it'll become any bigger than what it is. Also since many have tried to make it hype already, Tesla being the latest.
- jezzamon 1y agoIf you asked someone 300 years ago what an automated dishwashing machine would've looked like, it would be a lot more like a person than the wet cupboard we have now. I'm assuming many tasks will be like that -- it's more of a lack of imagination for why we say we need a humanoid robot to solve that task. I'm assuming it'll be the minority of tasks where it make it makes sense for that
- dudeinjapan 1y agoThis needs to be some sort of maxim: “The most useful robots are the ones that don’t look like (or try to be) humanoids.” For some reason (judging by Fritz Lang, Gundam, etc.) humanity has some deep desire or curiosity for robots to look like humans. I wonder if cats want robot cats?
- delusional 1y ago> humanity has some deep desire or curiosity for robots to look like humans. I don't think you can draw that conclusion. Most people find humanoid robots creepy. I think we have a desire for "Universal Robotics". As awesome as my dishwasher is, it's disappointing that it's nearly useless for any other task. Yeah, it washes my dishes, but it doesn't was my clothes, or put away the dishes. Our desire for a humanoid robot, I think, largely grows out of our desire for having a single machine capable of doing anything.
- dudeinjapan 1y agoThe vast majority of “universal robots” are portrayed as humanoids in science fiction. Perhaps part of the reason is that true “universality” includes socializing, companionship, human emotions, and of course love.
- tavavex 1y agoOr, alternatively, general-purpose robots tend to be human-shaped because the world as it already is has already been fully designed for humans. Single doors are tall because that's the size of a human. Tools are designed to be held in something like a hand, sometimes two of them. Stairs are designed to be walked on, and basically any other traversal method just falls apart. Of course, there is also the thing where authors and artists tend to draw anything with human intelligence as humans, from robots to aliens. Maybe it's the social reason you mention, or they just unconsciously have assumed humans to be the greatest design to ever exist. But even despite this, in a human world, I expect the first true general-purpose robots to be "standing" upright, with one or several arm-like limbs.
- Terr_ 1y ago> No sense of touch. Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. [...] We store energy in our tendons and reuse it on the next step Side-rant: As cool as some cyberpunk/sci-fi ideas are, I can't imagine a widespread elective mechanical limb replacement within the lifetime of anyone here. We dramatically under-estimate how amazing our normal limbs are. I mean, they're literally swarms of nanobots beyond human comprehension. To recycle an old comment against mechanical limbs: ________ [...] just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate. 1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations 2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water) 3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation 4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials 5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors 6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts 7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected 8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion 9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids 10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation) _______________ I predict the closest thing we might see instead will be just growing replacement biological limbs, followed by waldoes where you remotely control an arm without losing your own.
- card_zero 1y agoPer 5, it says here "Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. Getting anywhere near that kind of sensing out of robot hands and usable by a human puppeteer is not currently possible." Then another quote, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications." So (3) and (7) are relevant to lifetime, but another point, related to sensors, is that humans will stop hurting themselves if finger strain occurs, such as by changing their grip or crying off the task entirely. Hands are robust because they can operate at the edge of safe parameters by sensing strain and strategizing around risk. Humans know to come in out of the rain, so to speak.
- Animats 1y agoBrooks describes how speech preprocessed by chopping it up into short time segments and converting the segments to the frequency domain. He then bemoans the fact that there's no similar preprocessing for touch data. OK. But then he goes on to vision, where the form that goes into vision processing today is an array of pixels. That's not much preprocessing. That's pretty much what existed at the image sensor. Older approaches to vision processing had feature extractors, with various human-defined feature sets. That was a dead end. Today's neural nets find their own features to extract. Touch sensing suffers from sensor problems. A few high-detail skin-like sensors have been built. Ruggedness and wear are a big problem. Consider, though, a rigid tool such as an end wrench. Humans can feel out the position of a bolt with an end wrench, get the wrench around the bolt, and apply pressure to tighten or loosen a nut. Yet the total information available is position plus six degrees of freedom of force. If the business end of your tool is rigid, the amount of info you can get from it is quite limited. That doesn't mean you can't get a lot done. (I fooled around with this idea pre-LLM era, but didn't get very far.) That's at least a way to get warmed up on the problem. Here's a video of a surgeon practicing by folding paper cranes with small surgical tools.[1] These are rigid tools, so the amount of touch information available is limited. That's a good problem to work on. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-HHoqzQi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-HHoqzQi0
- Retric 1y agoAs you tighten a bolt the angle you need to apply force changes. So it’s not just a fixed position plus force in 6 directions its force in 6 directions at each position. You can learn quite a bit about something from such interactions such as an objects weight, center of mass, etc. Further robots generally have more than a single rigid manipulator.
- Animats 1y agoYes, it's time-varying data, but there are not that many channels. And the sensors are off the shelf items, although overpriced.
- nick49488171 1y agoYeah, humans can teleop some pretty complex operations even through cheap robot arms!
- mentalgear 1y ago> When an instability is detected while walking and the robot stabilizes after pumping energy into the system all is good, as that excess energy is taken out of the system by counter movements of the legs pushing against the ground over the next few hundred milliseconds. But if the robot happens to fall, the legs have a lot of free kinetic energy, rapidly accelerating them, often in free space. If there is anything in the way it gets a really solid whack of metal against it. And if that anything happens to be a living creature it will often be injured, perhaps severely.
- trhway 1y agoQuick googling brings smaller than a penny strain/pressure sensors under $10. That is a sense of touch enough for most of the tasks.
- mikaraento 1y agoThe article points out that the human hand has over 10000 sensors with specific spatial layout and various specialised purposes (pressure / vibration / stretching / temperature) that require different mechanical connections between the sensor and the skin.
- trhway 1y agothe Nature limited us to just 2 hands for all tasks and purposes. The humanoids have no such limitations. >10000 sensors with specific spatial layout and various specialised purposes (pressure / vibration / stretching / temperature) that require different mechanical connections between the sensor and the skin. mechanical connection wouldn't be an issue if we lithograph the sensors right onto the "skin" similarly to chips.
- mikaraento 1y agoSorry, I meant to emphasize _different_ mechanical connections. That a sensor that detects pressure has a different mechanical linkage than the one detecting vibration. So you need multiple different manufacturing techniques to replicate that at correspondingly higher cost. The “more than 10000” also has a large impact in size (sensors need to be very small) and cost (you are not paying for one sensor but 10000). Of course some applications can do with much less. IIUC the article is all about a _universal_ humanoid robot, able to do _all_ tasks.
- Jensson 1y agoYou don't need all those for most tasks modern tasks though. Sure if you wanna sew a coat or something like that, but most modern day tasks require very little of that sort of skill.
- 1y ago
- scotty79 1y agoI misread the title and I thought it was about humans. And I could see it. With prevalence of screens kids already don't learn a lot of dexterity that previous generations have learned. Their grip strength is weak and capacity for fine 3d motions is probably underdeveloped as well. Last week I've seen an intelligent and normally developing 7 year old kid asking mum to operate a small screwdriver to get to the battery compartment of a toy because that apparently was beyond his competence. Now with recent developments in robotics, fully neural controllers and training in simulated environments there could be that modern babies will have very little tasks requiring dexterity left when they grow up.
- pixl97 1y ago> because that apparently was beyond his competence. This has almost nothing to do with nature (barring a development issue). This has to do with nurture. Every time they went to do something with a tool a helicopter gunship of a parent showed up to tell them no. Now they have a learned helplessness when it comes to these things. But that's not really any different then when I was a kid so very long ago. At 4 or 5 I was given a stack of old broken radios and took them to the garage for a rip and tear session. I got to look at all their pretty electronic guts that fascinated me. There were plenty of other parents of that time that would have been horrified to see their kids do something similar.
- chmod775 1y agoIsn't another hardware problem being ignored here? Pound-for-pound muscle fibers are just superior to what you can achieve with electric motors or pneumatics. Take size, strength, precision, longevity, and speed. It's not hard to match or beat organic muscle fibers on one or two of these dimensions with an electrically driven system, but if it does, it's going to neglect other dimensions to such a degree as to put building a humanoid robot that achieves parity with a human completely out of reach. You can slather as much AI as you want on top of inadequate hardware - it's not going to help.
- imtringued 1y agoElectric motors are significantly better at the requirement that matters: endurance. Sure it takes a bigger motor to produce the same torque, but speed and precision are actually the strengths of electric motors. The fundamental problem with them is that reducers are not impact resistant and they have internal inertia, which is something muscles do not have. Another problem is building actuators with multiple degrees of freedom. The ideal configuration for legs is a ball joint, not two consecutive rotary joints.
- javiramos 1y agoWe have some great work digitizing touch and grasp: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1234-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1234-z
- carefulfungi 1y agoI don't follow (possibly through my own limitations) the main argument. > The center piece of my argument is that the brute force learning approaches that everyone rightfully touts as great achievements relied on case-specific very carefully engineered front-ends to extract the right data from the cacophony of raw signals that the real-world presents. In nearly each of the preceding examples, isn't the argument really about the boundaries that define the learning machine? Just because data preparation / formatting / sampling / serialization is more cost-effective to do externally from the learning machine, doesn't mean that boundary is necessary. One could build all of this directly inside the boundary of the learning machine and feed it the raw, messy, real world signals. Also, humans having plentiful learning aids doing "tokenization", as anyone who helped a child learn to count has experienced first hand.
- necovek 1y agoIf you understand "cost-effective" to mean the same thing as "feasible with today's tech", maybe. As in, if we feed it all the raw data, we'd need more powerful, expensive devices and they would take years or decades to complete any training on the raw data set. But without it being done, it's an unproven hypothesis at best.
- famouswaffles 1y agoIt wouldn't take decades or years of compute to train a language model that doesn't tokenize text first. It's not an 'unproven hypothesis' because it's already been done. It's just a good deal more cost effective to tokenize so those exercises aren't anything more than research novelty.
- necovek 1y agoIt did not sound like that's the only preprocessing step, but even with that, how "costly" would that be for a model comparable to ChatGPT 4 or 5? Also, the comment was not related to LLMs only. Note that the goal is to get comparable performance, iow to compare like for like.
- tpoacher 1y agoI think he meant to write "Prologue" instead of "PROLOG". I spent a few minutes excitedly trying to figure out how one of my favourite declarative programming languages was used to solve modern robotic sensing problems, only to realise it was probably just a misspelling ... :(
- bananaflag 1y agoYeah, he also immediately starts talking about GOFAI, to further confuse the Enemy...
- DonHopkins 1y agoQ: How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: False.
- rsynnott 1y agoI feel like the word ‘robots’ is a fairly serious omission from the title…
- etiennebausson 1y agoMy first though at the title was "But hominids are already quite dexterous."
- nicce 1y agoAt least for me it was obvious what humanoids mean, but I have worked in the field.
- rsynnott 1y agoWell, I mean, that’s what it means in one field.
- nicce 1y agoBut what humanoids are in the reality which lack the dexterity?
- marcosdumay 1y agoI really understood that to mean "modern humans", and expected some archeology content.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoI don't feel that scarecrow or sex doll dexterity is a major issue
- WalterBright 1y agoTry threading a nut onto a bolt. Pay attention to how your fingers feel when the threads engage properly and you aren't cross-threading it. Next, insert a Standard screwdriver into a screw head, set the screw in place, and screw it in. In order to make it work, you have to push and torque it at the same time, and not let the blade slip out of the hole or damage the screw head. If you think this is easy, try to teach a kid to do it. Watch them struggle to control the nut and the screwdriver. Our hands are really, really good at both major motor control and very fine motor control.
- shermantanktop 1y agoBoth those tasks require very fine force-feedback perception, instantly mapped to multiple possible scenarios that could be happening inside those metal parts. E.g. does it feel like I have crossed the threads, or is there a bit of rust? Let me twist just a bit more, but gently, to find out.
- manmal 1y agoFor some nuts and bolts, I myself struggle with it, almost to the point of giving up. But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment to make it easy to interact with by robots. There might be only standardized nuts and bolts, with IDs imprinted so the robots know exactly how to apply them. Dishes might come in certified robot-known dimensions, or with invisible marks on where to best grip them. Matchsticks might be replaced by standardized gas lighters. Maybe robot companies will even sell those themselves.
- protocolture 1y agoYep, this is what I reckon will be tried too. But then making that robot environment safe for humans to be in will be quite a tough problem.
- manmal 1y agoI imagine things will just be very unified and boring because the same shapes will be recognizable everywhere. But it would be the same things we already have. Just make the robot weak and light enough to not even be able to harm someone. Lighting the kitchen on fire is always a risk though, I guess.
- KnuthIsGod 1y agoFor the few who may not know: Rodney Brook's achievements include Lucid, the Roomba and Baxter.
- fragmede 1y agoWhich gives him great credibility on the history of the field, but is maybe a hinderance in advancing it. Advancement comes from people who are too ignorant to know that what they want to do is considered impossible by experts in the field. Not always, of course, but enough times that being the expert that created the Roomba back in the augts doesn't automatically mean he's right.
- k__ 1y agoDoesn't Carmack go that route? Letting AIs play games to learn, but by using physical controllers, etc.
- monkeydust 1y agoDoes this make telepresence / human controlled robotics either always on or step in for complex tasks, more relevant in the near to mid term?
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoGood question, it's already a thing for some use cases; what they can do in surgery is pretty amazing, but that's a use case where the robotic things have a huge benfit over people themselves. But that's a clear usecase of a complex task. For banal tasks like folding laundry... it'll remain more practical to just do it yourself, in the flesh. It can be done remotely but due to the limitations of robots and the internet it'll be slower and more expensive.
- metalman 1y agoWho is kidding who? Just watch a film of a single cell critter, approach something and one , go yum! and engulf it or two go ahhhhhhhh!, and run away I believe the full technical explanation for that goes, mumble,mumble,chemical receptors something, mumble mumble.Humans are sensitive to certain chemicals in the parts per billion, and your finger can detect surface roughness down to 1/1000'th of an inch, thats the standard issue, exceptional indivuals with training will perform significantly better.
- mcv 1y agoConfusing title because of the choice for the word "humanoid". When I see that, I expect we're talking about a creature shaped like a human. The word for human-shaped robots has always been "android". Can we please just continue using that?
- bananaflag 1y agoI like that this has serious arguments and not "humans are magical" stuff which one sees in discussions of possible limitations of AI reasoning. (The author specifies that it's about humanoids of today and not humanoids in principle.) This in particular shocked me a bit: > No sense of touch. Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. Getting anywhere near that kind of sensing out of robot hands and usable by a human puppeteer is not currently possible. This stands in contrast with e.g. self-driving cars, which are already superhuman at the sensor level.
- Symmetry 1y agoTouch sensors are a thing. A spin off[1] of a company I used to work for uses pressure sensors embedded in rubber to get a pretty robot and sensitive sense of touch, though the granularity is low and it doesn't do lateral force. [1]https://www.takktile.com/ https://www.takktile.com/
- toss1 1y agoYes, quickly skimming your linked site, I saw Pressure, Force, and Vibration sensors, but as you mention no mention of lateral force, nor of temperature. Thinking briefly about the sensations used in manupilating tools or checking a surface, both lateral and temperature are hugely important. And, of course the insane density of sensors built into human fingers relative to anything built by humans. It has a looong way to go
- nonameiguess 1y agoI don't know if it's playing sports my whole life and watching a lot of nature documentaries, but it really seems to me that certain types who spend 95% of their waking hours sitting at a desk don't appreciate just how capable, and frankly maybe even "magical," animal bodies really are. Someone is in these comments talking about how their muscle car can accelerate faster than a cheetah. Sure, but can it turn like one, jump onto and off of rocks, stop on a dime, time its acceleration to match the exact moment it needs to pounce on prey to knock it off its own feet while avoiding getting crushed or kicked itself? Humans have swam across the English channel, have swam from Cuba to Florida, from Alaska to Russia. Humans have run across the Sahara desert. We've scaled 2000 foot vertical rock walls with our hands. We've walked to the summit of every 8k mountain on the planet. We can go places like the top of Everest, the middle of Death Valley in the summer, deep wildnerness in thick forest or jungle, places that are so dangerous in part because rescue vehicles like ATVs, snowmobiles, and helicopters can't get there, but humans on foot can. And yeah, we can also thread nuts onto bolts, handle locked doors, do tre flips and impossibles on skateboards. Ultimately, we and all other animals are still just machines, and there is no reason in principle that machines built from engineered planned rather than grown from evolved plans can't do all of the exact same things and even more, but it's a harder problem than many seem to appreciate. Even when I was in a tank brigade in the late 2000s, we always went to Afghanistan as infantry, because our trucks and tanks were completely useless in the rocky, steep mountains, but there is no terrain anywhere that a sufficiently well-trained human can't traverse.
- masfuerte 1y agoThe fine article has a carefully crafted set of media queries. They react to every increase in the zoom level by shrinking the text. I would have read the article but my tired old eyes were unable to squint hard enough. Thanks web designers!
- hiddencost 1y agoI lost a ton of respect for the author when he started talking about speech recognition. He makes a few claims: (1) That speech recognition isn't end to end because it requires highly sophisticated mathematically crafted preprocessing. (2) That this is evidence human learning is more sophisticated than deep learning. So (1) is just nonsense. It was true 10 years ago but wasn't true 6 years ago. And if he's that far out of date, that really poisons my ability to trust him. And (2) misses some important knowledge about how humans work, which most speech recognition researchers know about. The human ear actually does it's own version of Fourier decomposition by using different length hairs in the ear. The human body does a ton of evolved preprocessing. Given that we could develop in decades audio preprocessing that took evolution millenia to build, we seem to be doing pretty well.
- ripe 1y ago> [preprocessing] was true 10 years ago but wasn't true 6 years ago Can you say more? What are some examples of speech recognition systems that don't need this preprocessing?
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoI'm a bit surprised that Brooks is focusing on sensory and electro-mechanical issues as being what's holding back humanoid robotics... Just being the shape of a human means nothing if it doesn't also have the brain of a human, which is needed if it's meant to be general purpose, or at least adaptable to a useful variety of tasks. How exactly are these robots meant to be trained for new tasks (or just same task, different factory, or different work station)? It seems that to be useful they'd need to be able to learn on the job. Even if they've been pre-trained in simulation to do a wide variety of things, and take natural language or imitation instruction, they are still going to need to bridge the sim-2-real gap, and book smart to proficient gap, to be able to perform, and that'd at least require runtime learning. Tesla/Musk seem to think that they're already in the robotics business with self-driving cars trained in simulation, but a car only has two degrees of freedom (speed and steering angle), and only performs one task - driving. A general-purpose humanoid robot is a whole other level of complexity.
- famouswaffles 1y ago>How exactly are these robots meant to be trained for new tasks (or just same task, different factory, or different work station)? It seems that to be useful they'd need to be able to learn on the job. The plan for raw intelligence is to push transformers as far as we can. What's the full extent of ICL for robotics ? We don't know the answer to that yet. This was released just a few days ago, https://www.skild.ai/blogs/omni-bodied https://www.skild.ai/blogs/omni-bodied