20 ms·

iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the AI and Robotics Hype

259 points by herbertl 1y ago

Michelangelo11 1y ago
> It’s simple intelligence, which is what we can do today and make reliable. It’s not sexy. It’s technology in the service of making things easier for workers and more efficient. Perfection.
rmason 1y ago
I really liked this guy. Maybe it's Boston but here's a guy with two wildly successful startups in robotics and he's having trouble raising money because his idea isn't sexy enough! I thought investors were smart and knew how to calculate odds. There is never any absolutely sure thing. But if a guy has been wildly successful twice aren't the odds pretty good he can do it a third time?
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  I know a very low profile entrepreneur who has essentially built the exact same business (with slight variations) 3 times over the past 20+ years, selling the first two, so yes I believe there is some corelation between his 2 previous successes and being able to do it again. Even if it's imaginary the funding markets swear by previous success being a strong marker for future success.
  - monero-xmr 1y ago
    Years ago my friend had the best app for a particular game in the App Stores. But competition was rising. So he just rebranded his app with a few changes and then got 3 of the top 5 spots! Same underlying app
    - imp0cat 1y ago
      And this is why we can't have nice things.
      - kakacik 1y ago
        Sounds rather like we are having a lot of (almost same) nice things
- jpm_sd 1y ago
  iRobot got crushed by Chinese competitors. Rethink failed early, they had a poor quality product and Universal made a much better cobot. And this new venture is pointless, there are 10 other companies in the Boston area alone doing warehouse automation...
  - infecto 1y ago
    Upvote for you sir. I was writing the same response as you posted the exact response. The only thing I did not mention that I will add here. iRobot was kind of a turd. They basically kept the same turd of a robot for a decade plus. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…
  - adabyron 1y ago
    I'm a huge fan of the ease of cleaning & repairing iRobots, especially the earlier models. I don't know if the competitors match that but I have preferred their simplicity & quality. China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.
  - Animats 1y ago
    The comment about humanoid forms raising expectations comes from Rethink's hype and failure. Rethink tried to solve manipulation and failed. The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1] What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      The industry term, I believe, is "skill issue". The conclusion to draw from "tried and failed" certainly isn't "it's impossible and everyone should give up on the notion".
  - binoct 1y ago
- irjustin 1y ago
  Having been through the VC system, I don't believe his face value statement, and I 100% believe you're right. They want to invest, but not at his terms that he's demanding. The thought experiment is - he wants to raise 1m @ 2m val. 50%. There's not a VC/angel/seed who wouldn't take that deal given who he is. So he's pricing himself at a level he "is willing to do this startup thing again" and it's simply too expensive.
  - oofbey 1y ago
    You assume VCs are rational. They try to be. But they’re not.
    - graycat 1y ago
      A guess: Smart VCs know that they are not smart enough to evaluate a business from a plan or a founder' background and instead wait for the revenue growing explosively.
      - ljlolel 1y ago
        A smart VC knows they have 0% chance of getting into that round (even the top VC maybe 1/3 chance) much less leading it by then, and only chance is getting into it when it’s still contrarian.
- infecto 1y ago
  Define success. Without a doubt iRobot was a category leader for a long time. They created the market but were they ever profitable? At this point it feels like a company on life support that is getting their butts kicked by the Chinese who offer double the product for half the cost. Without a doubt though he created the category. Was the second company ever a success, all I could find is it being trade for parts over and over. This third company looks interesting but it’s also a flooded market at this point. So for me the guy never had a real success and is currently building in a market that has been for years flooded with products like his.
  - yurimo 1y ago
    Rodney Brooks is widely recognized and celebrated roboticist, ran CSAIL for a while. iRobot as a company created a new market and managed to put a functional household robot out there, whether Chinese alternatives ate the share of it is largely irrelevant to his argument on humanoids, which I find to be completely reasonable.
    - infecto 1y ago
      There is a wide gap between academic and entrepreneur/business operator though. He was one of three co founders of iRobot the company l, is not even credited at the inventor of it, and iRobot has largely been a one hit wonder. They created a category but the underlying product largely was unimproved until China started dominating. His other business was a failure and his third current is in a crowded marketplace. Humanoids are the minority in warehouse automation. Who is even talking about his argument on humanoids? What does that have to do with my comment. My response was on a comment praising his triple success in business and I am questioning that definition of success.
      - ghc 1y ago
        You say one hit wonder, but iRobot's PackBot and other gov-focused efforts were/are very profitable, though the company had to spin off the defense arm.
- tennisflyi 1y ago
  I mean, VCs want stories (or at least hype) - not accolades, i.e., Altman, Neumann. Heck, accolades might hurt you. They want the unfound gem/they're so smart/cerebral...
itomato 1y ago
How many years were they on the market before they added a dust buster to the dock? 3-4?
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
One quote that really stood out to me: > Rodney: The robots—they’re not embodied. I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.
- gpt5 1y ago
  All these companies are pursuing humanoids precisely because we've built the world around that "form factor" (and we evolved ourselves to fit to the world). It's a general purpose design. It's the same reason why OpenAI pursued LLMs, as they are general purpose. Yes, like LLMs, they will over-promise in the beginning. But it still make sense to pursue that form factor from an investment perspective if we think it's feasible.
  - rolha-capoeira 1y ago
    And whether or not it actually is feasible, many are betting millions that it is, and marketing it as possible to keep the innovation machine running until we achieve it
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - imtringued 1y ago
    I don't know why people keep saying "the world" when they talk about extremely small subsets of human civilization. Most roads weren't designed for humans. Flat surfaces in buildings were not designed for humans. Packages were designed to be handled by suction cups. Containers were designed to be intermodal transport, not to be carried by humans. Space is practically inaccessible to most people. It's crazy how many people purposefully become ignorant of the things they see every day with their own eyes.
    - 1y ago
pts_ 1y ago
Aren't iRobots really not that clever and maybe can be improved with LLMs?
- solid_fuel 1y ago
  What mechanism are you envisioning here?
- smj-edison 1y ago
  I think they're just as smart as they need to be, and no smarter :)
- rogerrogerr 1y ago
  I have a Roomba 980 that I scored off a rich neighbor for $50. It cleans well, makes nice parallel lines on the floor and reliably does not get stuck. I can be out of the house, push the button for it to clean, and will always come back to a clean floor and a charging Roomba. Can't imagine wanting much more.
  - imp0cat 1y ago
    The 980 was top of the line, and it was also quite expensive when it was new. No wonder it still works quite well (and being so old, it still supports stuff like maps and voice control).
  - irusensei 1y ago
    I've retired mine in favor of a Switchbot. Battery was tired and the cost of a new one is 1/3 the price of a new one so I got this K10. At first I've liked it but the bruise rotor is already making rattling noises. It advertised itself as Matter compatible but I had to buy a hub thing to integrate it in HomeKit. Worst thing it relies on Chinese servers for its metrics. I got China blocked on my router due to reasons so I can't check the status of the parts without leaving my wifi. I already bought a box of 1 year replacement parts for this but I'm getting rid of it as soon as I can.
- leptons 1y ago
  iRobots were intended to clean up slop, not create more of it.
protocolture 1y ago
>At MIT, I taught big classes with lots of students, so maybe that helped. I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, “I just follow it.” (‘It’ being the GPS—Ed.) And that’s the issue—there’s human intervention, but people can’t figure out how to help when things go wrong. I live on a culdesac, and theres no instructions I could give uber drivers to help them find my house, when uber added a random roadblock on our street. I tried guiding them by voice, but none of them read street signs. Its crazy. They just rock up to the dot and complain. Issue being, the dot was the closest accessible street, so one street in either direction. One guy made the same wrong turn twice before cancelling. I hate taxis, but at least taxi drivers can be expected to have some basic local knowledge.
- pastage 1y ago
  You need to work out what the nearest routable adress is. This works wonderfully with taxis here. FWIW cul de sacs are an evil invention, and what you describe is a common routing problem. The rescue services here solved it by mandating addresses with geolocation and the nearest streets for every house around here. That failed me because everyone uses that official data that is convenient for fire truck rescue.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    The issue was resolved by complaining to the Uber Maps team for 9 months until they removed their fake road block. The work around in the interim was a combination of: 1. Writing a long description of how to access our property. 2. Trying to limit the distance an uber driver had to travel. <1km made it more likely for them to review the map and comment before driving. Dont ask me why. 3. Oscillating the drop off marker on the map to make it more likely that the driver was sent to our street at all, where we could wave at them to get them to drive beyond the psychological roadblock. 4. Attrition lead some drivers to remember my name, and just come straight to the property ignoring the map. Any other mapping service delivered people to our property fine. Its just that Uber randomly blocked the end of our street. Meaning our street had no entrance. Problem was that, uber has an exclusive relationship for delivery with one of our local supermarkets, and my wife doesnt drive and was stuck at home with an angry baby for the duration. Due to this issue we did push the maximum amount of our orders through other delivery apps, probably taking significant income away from uber. But they have deliberately structured their support channels to be impossible to deal with.
Animats 1y ago
This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.[1] There are already many companies selling automated carts that run around warehouses. Search for "automated guided cart". I thought the humanoid thing was silly until I saw the pricing. Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. I though these things were going to cost like Boston Dynamics products. No, the hardware is already much cheaper. This is still a low-volume product and prices are headed downward. Humanoid robots are going to be cheaper than cars. Having more degrees of freedom than you really need for any single job will be outweighed by the cost advantages of mass production and the advantages of interchangeability. The manipulation problem remains tough, but with moderately priced and standardized hardware available, more people can work on it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922
- ssivark 1y ago
  > Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot. > This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week. That Brooks' post is his latest one, from a few days ago.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    Seems like the kind of problems that would be amortized by scale. Anyone running a fleet won’t need to assemble one set of tooling per robot.
    - ssivark 1y ago
      Unitree wants to charge buyers $80-100k per-unit (at scale) in order to actually make money on their humanoids. So we're not in the era of $20k humanoids, despite appearances.
android521 1y ago
~"Brooks believes the sheer size of Nigeria is going to make it an economic and technological epicenter". I laughed when i read this. The sheer ignorance and false assumption that large population = epic economic powerhouse is ridiculous. I critize CCP a lot for various reasons but their effective and efficient governance over the last 40 years can not be easily replicated. Good governance is an incredibly rare asset. India has big pupulation but has no good governance. The chance of Nigeria having as good goverance as China is very close to zero.
- comboy 1y ago
  It's worth noting that China is investing heavily in Nigeria and it is also its biggest lender, it might turn out Nigeria's gov is not that far from CCP.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    China's third world investment adventures are questionable at best. And it would take extraordinary evidence for me to believe in Nigeria's government being competent.
    - chillingeffect 1y ago
      That invokes the ship of theseus. China could terraform Nigeria. Megabridges, super housing projects, surveillance, etc. (Wait this is still the rodney brooks discussion!?)
    - datadrivenangel 1y ago
      Agreed. Uganda has also received significant investment from China, but the lifespan of the infrastructure apparently leaves some to be desired. The new road to the airport in Kampala is a major improvement, but after a year or two of use is already cracking in some places so may not last as long as one would expect.
- davidCraigFergu 1y ago
  Well since you, of all people, find it hilarious, and honored us with your iron clad, deeply reasoned opinion, it must be immutable truism Time is not a linear function; creation and decay are not a normalized process. A large number of people can change inductive truism.
shreezus 1y ago
AGI doesn’t need to be “solved” for humanoid robots to be valuable at scale. The role of teleoperation is often underestimated; in the near term, many humanoids will likely be operated remotely by people halfway across the world, performing deliveries and other tasks cheaply.
- lm28469 1y ago
  Is that supposed to be something we want?
  - slaterbug 1y ago
    Honestly, it sounds like it would be really funny to me.
    - randomNumber7 1y ago
      Like playing Call of Duty where you can respawn and the others dont?
      - slaterbug 1y ago
        Of course not, I just think the idea of little humanoid robots being controlled remotely, running around doing deliveries and such would be amusing. The potential applications of this tech in war is concerning of course, but we don't have to allow that. And the more I've thought about it over time, I find the prospect of combat robots much less terrifying than the FPV drones we've been seeing used in Ukraine, or being obliterated by an unseen, unheard drone flying kilometers up in the sky before you even know what's happening.
  - hamdingers 1y ago
    Maybe not you, but the millions of people at risk of being run over by a forklift or buried in a ditch probably find the idea appealing.
    - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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holdenc137 1y ago
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seydor 1y ago
Things like simple robot arms could do wonders in crucial sectors like construction and agriculture where most the world does not have the industrial solutions of the US. Depopulation and aging is causing massive abandonment of agriculture in europe for example. Indeed we don't need a humanoid to lay bricks, but a not-too-expensive device could help with the housing crisis. > You can do so much more computation, sensing, some actuation, but people underestimate the long tail of the natural environment. Indeed, there are so many different application requirements that a single generic platform will never be possible. And humans are inefficient, so why do humanoids? We need a modular robotics platform backed by a big player/operating system
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I really enjoyed this interview. I didn't know that much about Dr. Brooks. Seems like a really practical, capable chap. He also looks a lot like Asimov (at least, in that photo).
boredhedgehog 1y ago
> We have affordances on the cart that lower the cognitive load. [...] In comparison, the state of the art is that people have scan guns, and on their wrists are tiny screens with character-based software—it’s ’80s or ’90s technology emulated on an Android device. They have to read that to know what bin number, what thing to do. Which means the literate person will get fired and replaced with an illiterate, because all the robot needs is a compliant gripping tool.
- Gud 1y ago
  Why would that be better?
gosub100 1y ago
Going back to the tired quote about AI doing the dishes and laundry, fundamentally what IS so hard about making a robot that does that? Is it the range of motion of my arm and hands? Is it computer vision not knowing the clearances of objects ? Even if the thing couldn't drive itself to the kitchen or laundry room, I would be fine wheeling it there and standing it in front of dirty clothes or dishes opening the appliance doors. But yet we don't have this. Each individual problem is solved: we have water proof electronics, we have precise multi axis stepper motors, we have computer vision that can map 3D spaces. We could even sell custom dishwasher inserts that are designed to make it easier for the robot. Why the hell do I still have to do the dishes?
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  Reliable, general-purpose gripping is still an unsolved problem. Especially in the consumer space. Your body has the near-miraculous ability of repairing itself continuously. Most gripper technologies require regular maintenance or they start to fail: suction cups wear out, sandbags start to lose elasticity, rubber gripping points get worn smooth. In an industrial setting, this is something that's manageable with maintenance schedules and the like, but will consumers be happy to replace suction cups every month so their robot doesn't start dropping dishes on the floor?
- callc 1y ago
  The dexterity, ultra precise motor control, and senses of the human hands are the bottleneck. That’s my guess at least. Seems like a fundamentally hard engineering problem. Evolution is mighty impressive!
vonneumannstan 1y ago
They're just a tired company not trying to innovate at all. My eufy is better at a fraction of the cost. How many versions of a robot vacuum can you make...
guywithahat 1y ago
Having interviewed at a few industrial robotics startups, I am concerned a bit for the short-term future of industrial robotics. Lots of companies by founders who have no real robotics experience, who seem to have lots of funding with no real customer base. Not to long ago I interviewed with an embodied AI company who's founders were from the Google DNS team and had no real robotics experience. They were obsessed with graph theory which, while cool, is solved problem in the context of robotics and their startup. Another pitched itself as advanced AI but was just a camera and YOLO object detection. I worry there is going to be a harsh market readjustment.
techlatest_net 1y ago
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arisAlexis 1y ago
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"Rodney: That's why I'm skeptical of the Tesla taxi system. At the last earnings call, Elon said they're going to have safety drivers in the Teslas and they're hiring remote drivers. It's sort of a charade. Rodney: I model myself as a realist. I've lived through so many hype cycles in AI. They weren't as big in public as this one, but they were brutal amongst AI practitioners. The arguments were strong and deeply held-screaming matches would happen. I've seen that happen again and again. Neural is ascendant at the moment, but neural was ascendant four or five times before and then got crushed. Something else took over, came back. You can see that in agentic AI. [OpenAI promotion of "agentic AI" is currently on HN front page, directly adjacent to this submission.^1] Now suddenly everyone's got agent-based AI. They didn't have it six months ago. I suspect it's a little more marketing than reality. But when was the first paper on agentic AI published? It was in 1959 by Oliver Selfridge. There's been agent-based systems-SOAR, there's been lots. They come and go, all these ideas, and they get improved every time they come back. I'm not saying it's stupid, I'm just saying as someone who's been involved, it is not just the shiny new thing. This thing that looks shiny now may not be so shiny in a few years." 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416080
RyanOD 1y ago
"It’s much easier to fund the promise than a real business, because real businesses have limitations on how fast they can grow. Whereas if you don’t know, you can live (and fund) the dream." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
fennecbutt 1y ago
Says the guy whose robot vacuums only now don't drag dog shit across your house in a robotic square dance purely because they now have a camera that uses AI to detect such things.

259 points by herbertl 1y ago

> It’s simple intelligence, which is what we can do today and make reliable. It’s not sexy. It’s technology in the service of making things easier for workers and more efficient. Perfection.

rmason 1y ago

I really liked this guy. Maybe it's Boston but here's a guy with two wildly successful startups in robotics and he's having trouble raising money because his idea isn't sexy enough! I thought investors were smart and knew how to calculate odds. There is never any absolutely sure thing. But if a guy has been wildly successful twice aren't the odds pretty good he can do it a third time?

skeeter2020 1y ago
I know a very low profile entrepreneur who has essentially built the exact same business (with slight variations) 3 times over the past 20+ years, selling the first two, so yes I believe there is some corelation between his 2 previous successes and being able to do it again. Even if it's imaginary the funding markets swear by previous success being a strong marker for future success.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  Years ago my friend had the best app for a particular game in the App Stores. But competition was rising. So he just rebranded his app with a few changes and then got 3 of the top 5 spots! Same underlying app
  - imp0cat 1y ago
    And this is why we can't have nice things.
    - kakacik 1y ago
      Sounds rather like we are having a lot of (almost same) nice things
jpm_sd 1y ago
iRobot got crushed by Chinese competitors. Rethink failed early, they had a poor quality product and Universal made a much better cobot. And this new venture is pointless, there are 10 other companies in the Boston area alone doing warehouse automation...
- infecto 1y ago
  Upvote for you sir. I was writing the same response as you posted the exact response. The only thing I did not mention that I will add here. iRobot was kind of a turd. They basically kept the same turd of a robot for a decade plus. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…
- adabyron 1y ago
  I'm a huge fan of the ease of cleaning & repairing iRobots, especially the earlier models. I don't know if the competitors match that but I have preferred their simplicity & quality. China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.
- Animats 1y ago
  The comment about humanoid forms raising expectations comes from Rethink's hype and failure. Rethink tried to solve manipulation and failed. The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1] What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    The industry term, I believe, is "skill issue". The conclusion to draw from "tried and failed" certainly isn't "it's impossible and everyone should give up on the notion".
- binoct 1y ago
irjustin 1y ago
Having been through the VC system, I don't believe his face value statement, and I 100% believe you're right. They want to invest, but not at his terms that he's demanding. The thought experiment is - he wants to raise 1m @ 2m val. 50%. There's not a VC/angel/seed who wouldn't take that deal given who he is. So he's pricing himself at a level he "is willing to do this startup thing again" and it's simply too expensive.
- oofbey 1y ago
  You assume VCs are rational. They try to be. But they’re not.
  - graycat 1y ago
    A guess: Smart VCs know that they are not smart enough to evaluate a business from a plan or a founder' background and instead wait for the revenue growing explosively.
    - ljlolel 1y ago
      A smart VC knows they have 0% chance of getting into that round (even the top VC maybe 1/3 chance) much less leading it by then, and only chance is getting into it when it’s still contrarian.
infecto 1y ago
Define success. Without a doubt iRobot was a category leader for a long time. They created the market but were they ever profitable? At this point it feels like a company on life support that is getting their butts kicked by the Chinese who offer double the product for half the cost. Without a doubt though he created the category. Was the second company ever a success, all I could find is it being trade for parts over and over. This third company looks interesting but it’s also a flooded market at this point. So for me the guy never had a real success and is currently building in a market that has been for years flooded with products like his.
- yurimo 1y ago
  Rodney Brooks is widely recognized and celebrated roboticist, ran CSAIL for a while. iRobot as a company created a new market and managed to put a functional household robot out there, whether Chinese alternatives ate the share of it is largely irrelevant to his argument on humanoids, which I find to be completely reasonable.
  - infecto 1y ago
    There is a wide gap between academic and entrepreneur/business operator though. He was one of three co founders of iRobot the company l, is not even credited at the inventor of it, and iRobot has largely been a one hit wonder. They created a category but the underlying product largely was unimproved until China started dominating. His other business was a failure and his third current is in a crowded marketplace. Humanoids are the minority in warehouse automation. Who is even talking about his argument on humanoids? What does that have to do with my comment. My response was on a comment praising his triple success in business and I am questioning that definition of success.
    - ghc 1y ago
      You say one hit wonder, but iRobot's PackBot and other gov-focused efforts were/are very profitable, though the company had to spin off the defense arm.
tennisflyi 1y ago
I mean, VCs want stories (or at least hype) - not accolades, i.e., Altman, Neumann. Heck, accolades might hurt you. They want the unfound gem/they're so smart/cerebral...

itomato 1y ago

How many years were they on the market before they added a dust buster to the dock? 3-4?

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

One quote that really stood out to me: > Rodney: The robots—they’re not embodied. I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.

gpt5 1y ago
All these companies are pursuing humanoids precisely because we've built the world around that "form factor" (and we evolved ourselves to fit to the world). It's a general purpose design. It's the same reason why OpenAI pursued LLMs, as they are general purpose. Yes, like LLMs, they will over-promise in the beginning. But it still make sense to pursue that form factor from an investment perspective if we think it's feasible.
- rolha-capoeira 1y ago
  And whether or not it actually is feasible, many are betting millions that it is, and marketing it as possible to keep the innovation machine running until we achieve it
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- imtringued 1y ago
  I don't know why people keep saying "the world" when they talk about extremely small subsets of human civilization. Most roads weren't designed for humans. Flat surfaces in buildings were not designed for humans. Packages were designed to be handled by suction cups. Containers were designed to be intermodal transport, not to be carried by humans. Space is practically inaccessible to most people. It's crazy how many people purposefully become ignorant of the things they see every day with their own eyes.
  - 1y ago

pts_ 1y ago

Aren't iRobots really not that clever and maybe can be improved with LLMs?

solid_fuel 1y ago
What mechanism are you envisioning here?
smj-edison 1y ago
I think they're just as smart as they need to be, and no smarter :)
rogerrogerr 1y ago
I have a Roomba 980 that I scored off a rich neighbor for $50. It cleans well, makes nice parallel lines on the floor and reliably does not get stuck. I can be out of the house, push the button for it to clean, and will always come back to a clean floor and a charging Roomba. Can't imagine wanting much more.
- imp0cat 1y ago
  The 980 was top of the line, and it was also quite expensive when it was new. No wonder it still works quite well (and being so old, it still supports stuff like maps and voice control).
- irusensei 1y ago
  I've retired mine in favor of a Switchbot. Battery was tired and the cost of a new one is 1/3 the price of a new one so I got this K10. At first I've liked it but the bruise rotor is already making rattling noises. It advertised itself as Matter compatible but I had to buy a hub thing to integrate it in HomeKit. Worst thing it relies on Chinese servers for its metrics. I got China blocked on my router due to reasons so I can't check the status of the parts without leaving my wifi. I already bought a box of 1 year replacement parts for this but I'm getting rid of it as soon as I can.
leptons 1y ago
iRobots were intended to clean up slop, not create more of it.

protocolture 1y ago

>At MIT, I taught big classes with lots of students, so maybe that helped. I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, “I just follow it.” (‘It’ being the GPS—Ed.) And that’s the issue—there’s human intervention, but people can’t figure out how to help when things go wrong. I live on a culdesac, and theres no instructions I could give uber drivers to help them find my house, when uber added a random roadblock on our street. I tried guiding them by voice, but none of them read street signs. Its crazy. They just rock up to the dot and complain. Issue being, the dot was the closest accessible street, so one street in either direction. One guy made the same wrong turn twice before cancelling. I hate taxis, but at least taxi drivers can be expected to have some basic local knowledge.

pastage 1y ago
You need to work out what the nearest routable adress is. This works wonderfully with taxis here. FWIW cul de sacs are an evil invention, and what you describe is a common routing problem. The rescue services here solved it by mandating addresses with geolocation and the nearest streets for every house around here. That failed me because everyone uses that official data that is convenient for fire truck rescue.
- protocolture 1y ago
  The issue was resolved by complaining to the Uber Maps team for 9 months until they removed their fake road block. The work around in the interim was a combination of: 1. Writing a long description of how to access our property. 2. Trying to limit the distance an uber driver had to travel. <1km made it more likely for them to review the map and comment before driving. Dont ask me why. 3. Oscillating the drop off marker on the map to make it more likely that the driver was sent to our street at all, where we could wave at them to get them to drive beyond the psychological roadblock. 4. Attrition lead some drivers to remember my name, and just come straight to the property ignoring the map. Any other mapping service delivered people to our property fine. Its just that Uber randomly blocked the end of our street. Meaning our street had no entrance. Problem was that, uber has an exclusive relationship for delivery with one of our local supermarkets, and my wife doesnt drive and was stuck at home with an angry baby for the duration. Due to this issue we did push the maximum amount of our orders through other delivery apps, probably taking significant income away from uber. But they have deliberately structured their support channels to be impossible to deal with.

Animats 1y ago

This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.[1] There are already many companies selling automated carts that run around warehouses. Search for "automated guided cart". I thought the humanoid thing was silly until I saw the pricing. Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. I though these things were going to cost like Boston Dynamics products. No, the hardware is already much cheaper. This is still a low-volume product and prices are headed downward. Humanoid robots are going to be cheaper than cars. Having more degrees of freedom than you really need for any single job will be outweighed by the cost advantages of mass production and the advantages of interchangeability. The manipulation problem remains tough, but with moderately priced and standardized hardware available, more people can work on it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922

ssivark 1y ago
> Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot. > This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week. That Brooks' post is his latest one, from a few days ago.
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  Seems like the kind of problems that would be amortized by scale. Anyone running a fleet won’t need to assemble one set of tooling per robot.
  - ssivark 1y ago
    Unitree wants to charge buyers $80-100k per-unit (at scale) in order to actually make money on their humanoids. So we're not in the era of $20k humanoids, despite appearances.

android521 1y ago

~"Brooks believes the sheer size of Nigeria is going to make it an economic and technological epicenter". I laughed when i read this. The sheer ignorance and false assumption that large population = epic economic powerhouse is ridiculous. I critize CCP a lot for various reasons but their effective and efficient governance over the last 40 years can not be easily replicated. Good governance is an incredibly rare asset. India has big pupulation but has no good governance. The chance of Nigeria having as good goverance as China is very close to zero.

comboy 1y ago
It's worth noting that China is investing heavily in Nigeria and it is also its biggest lender, it might turn out Nigeria's gov is not that far from CCP.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  China's third world investment adventures are questionable at best. And it would take extraordinary evidence for me to believe in Nigeria's government being competent.
  - chillingeffect 1y ago
    That invokes the ship of theseus. China could terraform Nigeria. Megabridges, super housing projects, surveillance, etc. (Wait this is still the rodney brooks discussion!?)
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    Agreed. Uganda has also received significant investment from China, but the lifespan of the infrastructure apparently leaves some to be desired. The new road to the airport in Kampala is a major improvement, but after a year or two of use is already cracking in some places so may not last as long as one would expect.
davidCraigFergu 1y ago
Well since you, of all people, find it hilarious, and honored us with your iron clad, deeply reasoned opinion, it must be immutable truism Time is not a linear function; creation and decay are not a normalized process. A large number of people can change inductive truism.

shreezus 1y ago

AGI doesn’t need to be “solved” for humanoid robots to be valuable at scale. The role of teleoperation is often underestimated; in the near term, many humanoids will likely be operated remotely by people halfway across the world, performing deliveries and other tasks cheaply.

lm28469 1y ago
Is that supposed to be something we want?
- slaterbug 1y ago
  Honestly, it sounds like it would be really funny to me.
  - randomNumber7 1y ago
    Like playing Call of Duty where you can respawn and the others dont?
    - slaterbug 1y ago
      Of course not, I just think the idea of little humanoid robots being controlled remotely, running around doing deliveries and such would be amusing. The potential applications of this tech in war is concerning of course, but we don't have to allow that. And the more I've thought about it over time, I find the prospect of combat robots much less terrifying than the FPV drones we've been seeing used in Ukraine, or being obliterated by an unseen, unheard drone flying kilometers up in the sky before you even know what's happening.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  Maybe not you, but the millions of people at risk of being run over by a forklift or buried in a ditch probably find the idea appealing.
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holdenc137 1y ago

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seydor 1y ago

Things like simple robot arms could do wonders in crucial sectors like construction and agriculture where most the world does not have the industrial solutions of the US. Depopulation and aging is causing massive abandonment of agriculture in europe for example. Indeed we don't need a humanoid to lay bricks, but a not-too-expensive device could help with the housing crisis. > You can do so much more computation, sensing, some actuation, but people underestimate the long tail of the natural environment. Indeed, there are so many different application requirements that a single generic platform will never be possible. And humans are inefficient, so why do humanoids? We need a modular robotics platform backed by a big player/operating system

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I really enjoyed this interview. I didn't know that much about Dr. Brooks. Seems like a really practical, capable chap. He also looks a lot like Asimov (at least, in that photo).

boredhedgehog 1y ago

> We have affordances on the cart that lower the cognitive load. [...] In comparison, the state of the art is that people have scan guns, and on their wrists are tiny screens with character-based software—it’s ’80s or ’90s technology emulated on an Android device. They have to read that to know what bin number, what thing to do. Which means the literate person will get fired and replaced with an illiterate, because all the robot needs is a compliant gripping tool.

Gud 1y ago
Why would that be better?

gosub100 1y ago

Going back to the tired quote about AI doing the dishes and laundry, fundamentally what IS so hard about making a robot that does that? Is it the range of motion of my arm and hands? Is it computer vision not knowing the clearances of objects ? Even if the thing couldn't drive itself to the kitchen or laundry room, I would be fine wheeling it there and standing it in front of dirty clothes or dishes opening the appliance doors. But yet we don't have this. Each individual problem is solved: we have water proof electronics, we have precise multi axis stepper motors, we have computer vision that can map 3D spaces. We could even sell custom dishwasher inserts that are designed to make it easier for the robot. Why the hell do I still have to do the dishes?

AlexandrB 1y ago
Reliable, general-purpose gripping is still an unsolved problem. Especially in the consumer space. Your body has the near-miraculous ability of repairing itself continuously. Most gripper technologies require regular maintenance or they start to fail: suction cups wear out, sandbags start to lose elasticity, rubber gripping points get worn smooth. In an industrial setting, this is something that's manageable with maintenance schedules and the like, but will consumers be happy to replace suction cups every month so their robot doesn't start dropping dishes on the floor?
callc 1y ago
The dexterity, ultra precise motor control, and senses of the human hands are the bottleneck. That’s my guess at least. Seems like a fundamentally hard engineering problem. Evolution is mighty impressive!

vonneumannstan 1y ago

They're just a tired company not trying to innovate at all. My eufy is better at a fraction of the cost. How many versions of a robot vacuum can you make...

guywithahat 1y ago

Having interviewed at a few industrial robotics startups, I am concerned a bit for the short-term future of industrial robotics. Lots of companies by founders who have no real robotics experience, who seem to have lots of funding with no real customer base. Not to long ago I interviewed with an embodied AI company who's founders were from the Google DNS team and had no real robotics experience. They were obsessed with graph theory which, while cool, is solved problem in the context of robotics and their startup. Another pitched itself as advanced AI but was just a camera and YOLO object detection. I worry there is going to be a harsh market readjustment.

techlatest_net 1y ago

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arisAlexis 1y ago

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"Rodney: That's why I'm skeptical of the Tesla taxi system. At the last earnings call, Elon said they're going to have safety drivers in the Teslas and they're hiring remote drivers. It's sort of a charade. Rodney: I model myself as a realist. I've lived through so many hype cycles in AI. They weren't as big in public as this one, but they were brutal amongst AI practitioners. The arguments were strong and deeply held-screaming matches would happen. I've seen that happen again and again. Neural is ascendant at the moment, but neural was ascendant four or five times before and then got crushed. Something else took over, came back. You can see that in agentic AI. [OpenAI promotion of "agentic AI" is currently on HN front page, directly adjacent to this submission.^1] Now suddenly everyone's got agent-based AI. They didn't have it six months ago. I suspect it's a little more marketing than reality. But when was the first paper on agentic AI published? It was in 1959 by Oliver Selfridge. There's been agent-based systems-SOAR, there's been lots. They come and go, all these ideas, and they get improved every time they come back. I'm not saying it's stupid, I'm just saying as someone who's been involved, it is not just the shiny new thing. This thing that looks shiny now may not be so shiny in a few years." 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416080

RyanOD 1y ago

"It’s much easier to fund the promise than a real business, because real businesses have limitations on how fast they can grow. Whereas if you don’t know, you can live (and fund) the dream." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

fennecbutt 1y ago

Says the guy whose robot vacuums only now don't drag dog shit across your house in a robotic square dance purely because they now have a camera that uses AI to detect such things.