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I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, espec
by Hugsbox 4mo ago
I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful. Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.
- post-it 4mo agoBecause a humanoid robot can replace (theoretically) any human worker, whereas a purpose-built robot can only replace one kind of worker. Or at least that's what Asimov said in Caves of Steel.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoThey have god knows how manny bajillion dollars tied up in machinery designed for human use, a human can step in when the robot breaks, and they can buy more robots if the humans get uppity. Those seem like a bunch of good reasons to me. The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
- ACCount37 4mo agoI'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. What remains unautomated, then? The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditional robots. This is where this new generation of robotics comes in. This is the kind of task they're designed to do: "a task that's still done by a human in a high automation environment". Universal robots are angling for the tasks that are impossible or uneconomical to automate with traditional industrial robots.
- looperhacks 4mo agoBut if these tasks are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot, how can a general purpose robot perform them better? If anything, they should be doing worse. The only thing I can think of are tasks that are so rarely done, it's not economical to build a robot for. But I then I also don't see how another robot solves this problem.
- ai_critic 4mo agoWell, humans obviously do those jobs, so a clearly a general purpose robot (in this case, a biorobot) has been found to do the job better. Don't overthink it.
- vlovich123 4mo agoA) the idea is that these robots do have dexterity capabilities a lot closer to human hands B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.
- Gud 4mo agoThese industrial robots have much better dexterity than any human alive. The point is, human shape plus general purpose intelligence is an amazing combination to resolve the “long tail”. Without the intelligence part, the body is useless. Perhaps Boston Dynamics has that part resolved now too.
- smikhanov 4mo agoIntelligence is absolutely a valuable addition to dexterity, but no, current industrial robots have nowhere near the dexterity of a human hand.
- adrian_b 4mo agoThe human arms and hands are very versatile, and imitating them is a good choice for a universal robot, though 3 or 4 arms are definitely better than 2, and the hardest to imitate are the sensors, not the actuators. But the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment, so the arms could be mounted on a mobile base that does not have any resemblance to a human.
- Ethee 4mo agoI'm spitballing here as I don't actually have a concrete answer for you. But from my understanding automobile manufacturing is one of if not THE most advanced 'purpose-built' robotics sectors. While I agree with you that having a purpose-built thing usually wins out for assembly line manufacturing, I wonder if this isn't an attempt to branch out away from single-purpose robotics into more general or multi-faceted manufacturing.
- Danox 4mo agoSpitball the who going to buy the product down the road...
- nradov 4mo agoI took a tour of the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg body shop. It's heavily automated with industrial robots inside safety cages. But they still have human workers pick up parts from rolling carts and place them into templates for the robot arms. BMW has been running a trial with Figure humanoid robots to automate that remaining piece. Apparently those robots haven't worked very well, but presumably Hyundai thinks they can do it better? https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robots.html https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...
- MysticOracle 4mo agoBD was training Atlas for Hyundai factory in Savannah, Georgia for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHeh7qwils https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHeh7qwils
- moffkalast 4mo agoCan't you just, you know, stick another robot arm on the damn carts and have it offload itself? Surely there's a simpler way. Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.
- Fabricio20 4mo agoConveyor belts? What about those funny looking warehouse robots that are on wheels and just move pallets around, maybe an arm strapped to it? Surely there are myriad ways to do this more efficiently and precisely than a humanoid robot! Just look at Intel's Fabs for example with the ceiling robots moving the delicate wafers..
- notahacker 4mo agoSome colleague of mine visited the Mini plant earlier this week. Apparently they had a Boston Dynamics dog patrolling simply to spot stuff that had been left where it wasn't supposed to be left
- stephc_int13 4mo agoI think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product. I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.
- stavros 4mo agoIt's much cheaper to create one general-purpose robot for everything than many different robots, each optimized to each task.
- glitchdout 4mo agoWar in Ukraine does not validate that assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwWwcnT7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwWwcnT7M
- XorNot 4mo agoWar is the definition of "not cheap" because the stakes are so high (you die). Ukraine is building what it can with anything it can get and also in a constant race to adapt and develop superior designs. You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.
- glitchdout 4mo agoYour sentences do not agree with each other. "building what it can with anything it can get" is the definition of cheaper. If it was easier or cheaper to create a multi-purpose robot to control vehicles and deliver bombs that's what we'd see Ukraine doing.
- XorNot 4mo agoNo because Ukraine needs things right now. Cheap is a secondary requirement to survival. So the reason you see a lot of drone designs is because they're constantly innovating to try and build something effective: which is not cheap. Then whatever they come up with, it's preferable to use it right now if you can: because it's available and delay may mean you no longer have it. Cheap is that last step: if it works you production optimize it and try to get the cost down so it's sustainable. But while that's happening you're generally also back to innovating because the enemy is deploying counter measures. And all of this is happening across multiple dimensions at once: if you can get a great bulk price from Alibaba for some part via an intermediary but it doesn't turn up on time, or an alternative is delivering faster or the warehouse for some part got hit last week then get, there's now a new drone design with that variant. Hell a lot of the output is just because the small machine shop knows how to build some particular design and has the parts, but another does not. Its war: the cash price of things is not the only price nor even necessarily the most important one.
- sgt 4mo agoThat's like saying there's no need for a generic CPU. The only way forward is a ASIC. Once a generic CPU does everything well enough, it's extremely versatile.
- jrflo 4mo agoCustom built robots are expensive (basically an R&D project in themselves) and inflexible, if you want to update the process you have to redesign your automated system. The dream of humanoid robots is they can adapt to new manufacturing processes like human workers.
- terramex 4mo agoHumanoidal robots make sense when they need to operate in spaces designed for humans bodies. Cars are designed and built to be used and serviced by humans, especially their interiors so you need humanoid robot to automate building them. Car exteriors are not built for humans to interact with so they are already being built by specialized robots.
- 93po 4mo agoThis exactly. You need to mow and leaf blow and weed and edge lawns. You need to get transported in a car from location to location. You need hands to operate all these tools. And arms. And given landscaping, likely legs. You need to move bags of mulch. Fitting in human environments and using human tools is a huge thing for areas of work and life where it doesn't make sense to move a 2000 pound robotic arm around from place to place. Dishes, laundry, house cleaning, cooking, food prep, organization, lawn work, car repair, home repair, etc etc etc. Expecting purpose built robots for every single task seems ridiculous.
- sampton 4mo agoWhy do you need software when FPGA can solve everything.
- RajT88 4mo agoRobot Chicken had a fairly cynical take on this. I won't link it here.
- Dumblydorr 4mo agoYou don’t understand because you’re not an expert? First off they have numerous non-humanoid robots if you follow them at all. Second, Clearly they’ve got strong reasoning, they’ve just been bought. Third, out of thousands of attempts at humanoids, their robots are seemingly the best we’ve yet seen in this class. They must be doing it right when so few others got any traction.
- justsomehnguy 4mo ago> they need to be useful They would be. When everything what could be done would be done by a robot. 24/7. Even without the lights on the floor.
- ramses0 4mo agoI'm looking for a better video of it (from one of the engineers), but look at the NASA robot hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfDXzkFHnz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfDXzkFHnz0 https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+robonaut+video+hand+why+design+that+way https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+robonaut+video+hand+why... The gist of it is that all tools on the spacecraft (eg: space-drill, space-coffee-maker, space-airlock) are all designed to fit a gloved human astronaut hand. Waaaaay more complicated to make a robo-hand than a robo-suction cup or robo-claw, but then you are matching the environment, and guarantee tool compatibility against all extant tasks! We already have specialized robots on earth... paper slicer, lawn mower, bazooka, whatever. They're all machines that are specialized for the task at hand, we're not making a humanoid robot that gets down on all fours and individually plucks blades of glass. The car factories already have specialized robots... they're not mimicking a human hand holding a can of spray paint, shaking it up, and painting the car that way... it's a 6-axis arm, or a whole "grab the car and flip it while spraying paint" system. It's not about inventing purpose-specific robots, it's about handling that long-tail of "stuff with tools that a human is designed to be able to use." Go over there, push that button. Go move that box from table1 to table2. Etc. For well defined tasks in the factory domain, make a "real robot". For ad-hoc tasks in the interim... strap an LLM to a camera, battery, robo-legs and arms, cross your fingers, and hope for the best?
- Jegber 4mo agoThe human form IS the most optimal way to do most tasks
- gowld 4mo agoMost human tasks. Earth-movers and mining-trucks aren't human form.
- stevenhuang 4mo agoMost tasks are human tasks.
- itsamario 4mo agoPatient complex moves first.
- bombcar 4mo agoThe first somewhat general purpose humanoid robot will sell like gangbusters to the rich, even just as a parlor toy/trick.
- dyauspitr 4mo agoThis same nonsensical question again. Because the world is built for humans, because these are general purpose to replace a human laborer. It can immediately go from picking up parts in a factory to mowing the lawn in the same day.
- PeterStuer 4mo agoOur'legacy' world is built for human shsped operation. So a generic operator will hsve to mimic human shape.
- ckemere 4mo agoTraining data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…
- gowld 4mo agoAI watching videos of humans seems an incredibly inefficient way to solve acrobatic balance. It is just physics and engineering. The hard part is in the materials and assemblages for enabling complex and subtle movements and the fine motor control, not knowing what the motions are.
- marcta 4mo agoMaybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.
- bigmadshoe 4mo agoTwo things: 1) we have abundant training data for humanoid embodiments (watch humans do things), and 2) the world is already designed for humans.
- Graziano_M 4mo ago#1 is the main reason. There is basically unlimited data of things being done with human bodies, and it's also the easiest data to collect (tell a human to do something).
- imtringued 4mo agoWhenever the topic is about humanoids all the technologists suddenly become creationists to sell the product. There's half a dozen techno-creationists in this HN submission. Something these techno-creationists are silent about is the fact that "for human designed" environments require the full intelligence of a human and not just have the limbs of a human. The reason for that is that most of these environments are hardly designed at all and instead rely intensively on extreme levels of human adaptation. It's like self driving cars. The extreme tail end of things a driver must do is endless. You will have to draw a line somewhere that designates the limits of the robots and the moment you do, you will have to design environments for humanoid robots instead of humans.
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- saltcured 4mo agoI understand the sentiment, but you assume they are planning to build humanoid robots to walk around the human-oriented space in the factory. Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?
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- carabiner 4mo agoHugsbox has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, that's why he hasn't responded to anyone here.
- csallen 4mo agoWe have a world built for humans, designed for humans to walk around and get things done. How, exactly, would it not be useful to have a robot that looks, walks, runs, jumps, lifts, carriers, pushes, pulls, twists, bends, steers, and labors like a human? It would obviously be incredibly useful.
- Hugsbox 4mo agoAs a person who works in a factory, areas are changed drastically, regularly, and quite fast. The cost of adapting areas to accommodate purpose-built machines pales in comparison to making robots work in suboptimal ways. It's much more cost-effective to rebuild a production area for very specific machines (something my workplace does frequently but never seems to replace workers) than it is to engineer and manager a machine to do work that's already best-suited for human workers.
- jbullock35 4mo agoThis recent article has a few relevant notes about the uses (or lack thereof) of humanoid robots: https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2026/0612/ai-humanoid-robot-workforce https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2026/0612/ai-humanoid-rob....
- SeriousM 4mo agoAt least a third arm would be helpful. I can't count how many times I've wished for a third arm!
- sciencejerk 4mo agoHow about a third leg? Eh?
- stainablesteel 4mo agothey don't need to use the whole humanoid, they can take the legs or abdomen alone and use them as is the human frame is just an experimental proxy for functionality, which turned out to be promising two arms alone is the purpose-built robot you're referencing
- moralestapia 4mo ago>The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks What are you talking about? Go outside, look around! The whole word was created by and for humans.
- zeofig 4mo agoMarketing
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- danielsilbaugh 4mo agoThe world is built for the human form already. If we design around the robotic form instead, we lose compatibility with all that, and lose the fallback of using human tools/interfaces manually if the automated systems go down. Plus I'd rather have robots that look like Robin Williams than the sentinels from the Matrix.
- alkonaut 4mo agoI wonder what the reason is to not go humanoid but super-human? Lack of training data? For example, having 3 arms would help a lot of tasks. Or having fingers with twice the length of human fingers and 4 joints on each finger could enable them to switch a headlight bulb on a French car.
- XorNot 4mo agoThe third arm would put a load in one direction of the robot. You can no longer balance by swinging 1 arm back, you have to swing both of them, or involve a leg motion you might not want to because the third arm has a more limited range of motion. Hands are just hard: no one is building good hands yet because the materials science and motors isn't there to do it (see the production Atlas's with the 3 finger grippers). And of course training data: we have a wealth of examples of how to move a bipedal platform around, but there are no 4-armed humans so you'd be figuring out the balancing from scratch (but it also has the same problem: 4 arms in physics terms is still basically 2: if you lose your balance you'll need to involve both arms to correct it).
- bjackman 4mo agoFor my personal use, I really fucking want a humanoid robot, coz my home and all the bullshit in it was built for humanoids, I want a robot to do the bullshit for me. I don't want to move into a new, robot-oriented home. I've never been to a factory but I bet there's a lot of the same bullshit. Ditto in a mine. On the other hand, I've been in a datacentre. I don't see much need for a humanoid form in there, everything is flat and predictable. Why don't we have robot DC techs? This is probably an interesting clue re the next 10 years of robotics and maybe the reason Boston Dynamics is only valued at $1.1B. Seems we might still be pretty limited on usecases. Maybe a dexterity bottleneck.