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We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. Amazon has been trying to automate that for years, with many demos and contests. So f
by Animats 6mo ago
We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. Amazon has been trying to automate that for years, with many demos and contests. So far, nothing can quickly and reliably take random products out of one bin and put them in another. Amazon's robotic systems move larger containers and shelves of bins around, but do not yet pick individual items.
- dmix 6mo agoThere's a lot more money being thrown at this than in previous years. Seems to be growing beyond corporate R&D labs and university research towards startups trying to productize it. I've seen multiple articles about robotic claws. This one made the rounds previously https://www.firgelli.com/pages/humanoid-robot-actuators https://www.firgelli.com/pages/humanoid-robot-actuators
- sigmoid10 6mo ago>A humanoid robot takes roughly 5,000 steps per hour. Each step sends a shock of 2–3× body weight through the leg actuators—forces that would be fine occasionally, but become destructive when repeated thousands of times without pause. As someone who comes from the world of running and knee problems, I feel this misses the issue. Normal walking should not produce these kinds of shocks unless your gait is really jumpy or otherwise screwed up. You only start to see these forces when running and that's where technique becomes important even for humans if you want to prevent damage to your joints over long distances. But at least for walking I suppose that a fully articulated humanoid with all the degrees of freedom of human gait should be mostly a control problem, not a mechanical engineering one.
- imtringued 6mo agoThe force an impulse generates on a contact depends on the speed of deceleration. It's just F=m*a Slow deceleration leads to low forces. If you have a contact event with a hard substance, like a rigid metal for accurate kinematics, the deceleration to zero upon a contact has to happen instantly. Meaning the deceleration is incredibly high, resulting in extremely high forces for a few milliseconds. Human bodies are made out of a flexible and impact resistant material: water. When a contact event happens, your body deforms, which means that the deceleration happens over a longer time frame with less force. Not just that, your muscles also have a certain amount of flexibility in them and basically zero internal inertia. All the inertia is in the limb as a whole, whereas for a robot there is a spinning motor and gearbox that needs to slow down as well. You could solve this as a control problem by adding series elastic actuators, which means you need to change your mechanical design.
- hwntw 6mo agoThe human body goes further than that too, when you're out jogging - as your foot approaches the ground for a stride, you slow the velocity of your foot downwards towards the ground so there's less of a sudden deceleration. Imagine when you throw a tennis ball high in the sky, and then you catch it on your racket without bouncing by matching it's velocity, your feet do the same thing with the ground on a smaller scale.
- nixon_why69 6mo agoThen you have several hinges absorbing/dissipating that energy if you're using good form: foot flexes with a pivot in the arch of your foot, calf/achilles stretches with a pivot in your ankle and quad with a pivot in your knee. It should look like an angled, backwards Z at strike with nothing just straightened and tanking the impact. Nobody actually runs perfectly enough to take 100% of the impact out of your joints but good form routes as much as possible into the muscles/ligaments around the joints instead of straight through them. It's a lot of little bitty unconscious nerve endings and muscles so one could expect it will take a while to iron out for robots. Thinking about it more, maybe the issue here is that there's no self-healing stretchy ligaments involved in robots to begin with, even before the control issue.
- sigmoid10 6mo agoThat's missing the point. Try jump-walking with your legs locked straight on impact. You'll feel the pressure on your joints pretty quickly. Now try walking normally (i.e. hitting your heels with your legs extended while your center of mass barely moves vertically). The acceleration your body accumulates under gravity will be way shorter and so will be the deceleration force your joints have to bring up to compensate.
- p-e-w 6mo ago> We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.
- somewhatgoated 6mo agoWhat is the point of humanoid “general” robots then? We already have pretty reliable ways to make and train humans. Humans are cheaper and better than robots. I could imagine robots for some specialised tasks where you don’t want to use a human for eg security reasons, but you don’t need general purpose robots for that
- nemomarx 6mo agoIf robots ever do get cheaper than humans for it, though?
- shermantanktop 6mo agoIn natural ecosystems, nobody beats the apex predator directly, and nobody beats the hyperspecialized niche critter at their own game. The new species has some advantage that’s different than what is there. If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
- throwaway2037 6mo agoYou raise a great point. And the Amazon picking staff are onshore in wealthy countries. I guess the minimum wage paid by Amazon is around 15 USD per hour. I wonder: Is the task of automating this work primaryly difficult in vision or dexterity (motion)? Or maybe they are equally difficult for different reasons.
- whiplash451 6mo agoProbably both vision and dexterity, and the first mistake we make as roboticists/engineers might be to distinguish the two like they're separate problems to solve or that a solution exists where the two live a separate life. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
- grumbelbart 6mo agoAgreed. The solution will likely be some vision foundation model that directly sends controls to the robot ("move here, grab, move there"), trained by Amazon with RL to integrate collision avoidance, object detection, grasping point detection, grasp verification etc.
- fluoridation 6mo agoIf we're talking about picking objects at random from one bin and putting it in another, I don't need my eyes to do that. Proprioception (shape and location) and touch (texture) are enough to do that.
- jagged-chisel 6mo agoBut we still don’t have good sensors for this, so our robots try to rely on vision.
- fluoridation 6mo agoYou need those anyway to know how much grip to apply and how to hold on to the object. You can't determine that visually.
- inglor_cz 6mo agoAs others say, not necessarily. The breakeven point for jobs like Amazon may be quite low (or high? I mean simply "not yet there"). I'd say that we'll know it works when robots with those hands start turning out on the Russo-Ukrainian frontline en masse, because it is there where the lack of manpower has the most pressing and brutal consequences, and cannot be mitigated by usual peacetime incentives (e.g. better benefits). That frontline has already sucked in all the automatization innovations of the last decade, as long as they proved themselves in combat.
- sebastiennight 6mo ago> we'll know it works when robots with those hands start turning out on the Russo-Ukrainian frontline en masse What would a clawed robot be able to accomplish that can't be done by a flying drone or unmanned wheeled vehicle?
- inglor_cz 6mo agoRendering medical aid to a wounded person? Fixing defects on a stranded vehicle?
- julienfr112 6mo agoMaybe this workforce is useful not because of it's direct output, but for it's mere existence : look politian, I'm creating jobs !
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- jgalt212 6mo agoAmazon is also my personal AGI test. When one can link up frontier model to Mechanical Turk and regularly make money, game over.
- yencabulator 6mo agoAt that point, Mechanical Turk pricing would drop to match LLM token cost.