5 ms·
In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere, doing all sorts of chores for us. They’re going to need hands.
by yakbarber 5mo ago
In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere, doing all sorts of chores for us. They’re going to need hands.
- nkrisc 5mo agoThat’s an incredibly optimistic timeline.
- pedalpete 5mo agoSlowly, then all at once. Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them. The internet was tiny, then everywhere. Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them. GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them. This is how things playout time and time again. Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoIt took almost 20 years from computers that nobody brought on electronics and photography stores to computers in everybody's desk. Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.
- dmix 5mo agoMostly just the cost, yeah. It will be like buying a car. The economics will have to make sense for regular people, while it starts popping up in tons of places and become a status symbol.
- jcelerier 5mo agorobots have existed for more than 20 years though. Boston Dynamic's dog is 22 years old, Atlas 15-ish
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoWhat can I as a normal person use these robots for?
- marcosdumay 5mo agoComputers also existed for more than 20 years before they started being sold to end-users. And again, the robots market will probably not evolve anything near as fast as the computers.
- Gigachad 5mo agoWe have had more than 10 years of robotic vacuums and yet they are still a fairly niche product.
- bigyabai 5mo agoDigital computers existed for ~10-20 years before hitting the consumer market. It took almost a half-century for the microprocessor to become a ubiquitous appliance.
- SequoiaHope 5mo agoWe’re already seeing huge progress in humanoids coming from china. The big problem is software and world understanding, but the data collection from today’s humanoids and the rush to capitalize on their potential now that manufacturing their form is largely solved (save for hands) will see these problems overcome. I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoSo, after they work out all the mechanical kinks (there are quite a few!), and after they work out all the software issues (again, many of them), the last problem is the biggest: production. Anyone can make a half dozen robots by hand. A hundred thousand is a completely different challenge. If they can't be made efficiently, their cost makes them more of a toy than a tool.
- nine_k 5mo agoOne of the Tesla's factories is winding down car production in a plan to convert to producing humanoid robots.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoI can buy China doing it, but not Tesla. They have a terrible track record of production, nothing even close to China's capability. In the past they've "developed" factories by taking huge government incentives and then basically doing nothing with them and pocketing the cash.
- oblio 5mo agoIs that because they're close to building robots or because Chinese EVs are eating their lunch and Tesla is flatlining?
- ReptileMan 5mo agoThe line between moonshot and scam is thin and elon is known for doing jumping jacks on it.
- nradov 5mo agoI predict that we'll see limited combat use of the latest Chinese bipedal robots within two years. They'll sell to both Russia and Ukraine.
- oblio 5mo agoUkraine already has UGVs and they're tracked or wheeled. I can't imagine bipedal robots being cost efficient for 99% of missions in the near future.
- nradov 5mo agoRight, the wheeled and tracked units are more cost efficient. But there are some mission sets and terrains for which bipedal robots will be more effective. Everything is going to get tested to see what works.
- walrus01 5mo agoI remember a certain public personality who is very big on bipedal humanoid robots these days also promising us that we'd have truly autonomous self driving cars from his company by 2022, or 2023. It's now 2026.
- Gravey 5mo agoWe can debate the meaning of “truly autonomous”, but the Tesla-owning friends and acquaintances of mine have all, without any uncertainty, recently commented to me that the top-tier self-driving plan in the modern Teslas is just that. One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.
- boc 5mo agoHighway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions. Just look at the difference between the telsa robotaxi performance vs Waymo. Only one of them is truly FSD.
- Gravey 5mo ago> Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control. Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.
- chihuahua 5mo agoToday, Tesla's so-called full self-driving system is legally classified as SAE Level 2 driver assistance [1]. The human driver must continuously monitor the system, be ready to take over instantly at any time, and is legally responsible for the the car. Tesla is careful to avoid any liability for this by stating this somewhere, perhaps in a 3-point font. Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot
- LastTrain 5mo agoWhy bipedal?
- p-e-w 5mo agoBecause the human world is built for bipedal beings and everything else will encounter obstacles somewhere.
- Mars008 5mo agoDogs and cats don't complain. Gorillas and chimpanzee should be fine too. Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.
- AngryData 5mo agoYeah, I think 4+ legged bots should be more common than 2 leg variants. 2 legs is neat, but takes far more work and processing to control and balanced. It also requires much more powerful legs, a spider bot has more legs which makes it more "complex" in some ways, but individual legs don't need to hold and maneuver its entire body weight alone and it can hold 3 points of ground contact at all times, even when moving around, making it exceptionally stable. A bipedal robot has to be able to hold like twice its own body weight or more in order to balance and maneuver on a single foot in order to walk around and navigate obstacles.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoThe bipedal robot thing is interesting, but there's only two places their cost makes sense: industry and war. After war makes them cheap to mass-produce (because an army of robots needs to be sustainable), then they'll be affordable. But they'll still be highly regulated, mostly as a political reaction to "losing jobs". It will probably take 30+ years for us to get to that point, because wars big enough to invest that much expense and manpower aren't common.
- Mars008 5mo agoChinese Unitree already makes humanoids for $5K. Cheap enough for average american family to afford if it's useful. Several batteries and automatic replacement station will make it run 24/7 non-stop. So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoThat is interesting, but it looks like the ones used for practical work are $30k. Still, they're targeting 20k units this year, which is a lot more production and a lower price than I imagined they'd be at by now.
- Mars008 5mo agoAt least it's obvious we are close to have cheap mechanically capable robots. As soon as they get smart enough to be useful mass production will begin. We are almost there. (Un)fortunately China is leading here. With all production there it will be hard for US companies to compete. Especially outside of US market.
- ta20240528 5mo ago"Especially outside of US market." A euphemism in polite company for: we'll ban them on national security grounds like we did with cars and phones.
- tamimio 5mo agoAs someone in the robotics, I can tell you that’s never gonna happen, even if you see a fully functional demo of a robot (not just the typical money grab 3D renders), assume the real life performance are 10x worse.. there’s so much monkey business in robotics, plenty of over promising, so much empty hypes, that been going on for years, the only successful breeds are cobotics (like roomba and industrial manipulators) or recently drones, although still very limited due to endurance.
- analog31 5mo agoI'd consider hands to be more important than bipedal mobility. I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens. Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present. In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.
- FourierEnvy 5mo agoYes, thats your current perspective. But by the time you get programmers, the whole company will be automated
- hanspeter 5mo agoWhile I agree we'll see millions of bipedal robots, it won't be because they're doing our chores. People will buy them for the same reason I'd want one today: They're fun toys. It's been 10 years since Boston Dynamics released this impressive video of Atlas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY Even though today's robots are vastly more sophisticated, the progress of the last decade shows we shouldn't expect a sudden revolution in their abilities over the next ten years. As is often the case, solving those final few challenges that really make a difference always takes the longest.
- kibwen 5mo ago> In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere No, there won't be, and I have no clue why you think this is true. It's been more than 15 years since the first demos of self-driving cars, a much easier problem than useful bipedal robots coexisting in spaces made for humans, and self-driving cars are still hardly anywhere, despite the breathless predictions 15 years ago that all cars and trucks everywhere would be self-driving as of what is now 5 years ago.