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I'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 f

I'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 ago
But 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago
  A) 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 ago
    These 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 ago
      Intelligence is absolutely a valuable addition to dexterity, but no, current industrial robots have nowhere near the dexterity of a human hand.
    - adrian_b 4mo ago
      The 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.
      - fc417fc802 4mo ago
        > the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment I dunno, a legged design is pretty useful for navigating complex environments. The arms and legs have to attach to something so you've still got some sort of torso. About the only thing you can easily do away with is the head I think. But certainly a bipedal design seems unnecessarily complicated unless you need it to climb ladders inside narrow tubes or something similarly specific. I feel like a quadruped with 4+ arms mounted on top and many-jointed fingers might be ideal (both in terms of utility and also creepiness).
        Symbiote 4mo ago
        In a factory, where you can guarantee a hard, smooth floor, I would think wheels are better in most cases than four feet. But of course the wheels could be replaced with feet where that's needed.
  - CSSer 4mo ago
    And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.
    - boredatoms 4mo ago
      and humans collude via unions
- j-pb 4mo ago
  These robots operate on completely different principles. One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines. The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.
  - ACCount37 4mo ago
    Pretty much. It's a total paradigm shift from how industrial robots normally work. A pre-planned motion executed carefully and precisely vs open-ended "do this thing" powered by a very large bag of opaque neural network heuristics. A robot that has to be carefully adapted and set up for the task vs a robot that you can point at a task and have it figure out how to do it. A robot that doesn't deviate vs a robot that absorbs all kinds of deviations. It's a bet that The Bitter Lesson will win over Moravec's Paradox, in the end.
  - btown 4mo ago
    It's also worth noting that when e.g. inputs to a stage might have unpredictable defects or alignment, a robot arm utilizing neural networks for planning and analysis might still be the best way to handle that - without the extra degree of freedom of movement-relative-to-floor, planning can be done more rapidly, and movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly. If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.
    - j-pb 4mo ago
      > movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly That's exactly the reason why it's usually a bad idea to run a classical robot on a neural controller. If atlas bumps into something you get a small bump and maybe a broken atlas. Your average industrial robotic arm will happily yeet whatever it bumps into across the room.
- suby 4mo ago
  Because it is general purpose. We did not have the ability to create a single robot form which could do all of these minor, finicky, and opened ended tasks. Now that seems within reach. The nice property of humanoid robots is that the world is already made for human form, and so if you're trying to replace people naturally this is what you'd want.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- sib 4mo ago
  >> how can a general purpose robot perform them better Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.
- IncreasePosts 4mo ago
  It's not a "general purpose" robot, it is a "human replacement" robot, with similar skills and shortcomings to a human. Humans are not general purpose. All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
ranger_danger 4mo ago
They're just one of today's lucky ten thousand. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- ASalazarMX 4mo ago
  According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.
  - ranger_danger 4mo ago
    I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It explicitly says we should not be negative towards people for not knowing things.
  - xboxnolifes 4mo ago
    The math on the xkcd is just wrong tbh. In multiple ways.
  - jaredsohn 4mo ago
    'Everyone over 30 knows this' is a prior assumption (it is not necessarily correct; and nothing is said about shame). The comic strip is saying if above is true, then people still have to learn at some point so on average it would be around 10k people per day. I think the math is this: For people born in a given year: 4000000/365/30 = 365 people per day but you have 30 sets of those people (those born this year, those born last year, those born two years ago, etc.) So 365 * 30 = 10950. 10k is easier to say for viral purposes.
cpgxiii 4mo ago
> 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. Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/fixed gantry. Wheeled mobile manipulators are only needed in a few cases, and humanoid form-factor is only "necessary" in very few cases (and I don't think the current crop of humanoids is particularly suited to these tasks). In my opinion/experience, the impediments are that (1) the system integrators that are usually responsible for assembly-line robotics are too stupid to figure out how to apply robots to the problem, (2) the automakers themselves are often too short-sighted/stupid/unwilling to invest in increased automation (and particularly in building the in-house competency that they really need), (3) the hostile/exploitative relationship between (most) automakers and their main suppliers means that low-hanging improvements to parts/assemblies are a non-starter, and (4) the automaker C-suite (and investors) are too drawn to silver-bullet solutions (e.g. humanoids) than practical automation improvements.
- fooker 4mo ago
  How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
  - claw-el 4mo ago
    Also, a general purpose robot vs a custom purpose robot represent very different capital investment profile for the factories?
  - serf 4mo ago
    automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.
    - 4mo ago
LanceH 4mo ago
> What remains unautomated, then? And the tasks that change from day to day.
colordrops 4mo ago
Naw, the real answer is that factories have been built around human labor - they weren't built to be forward-compatible with purpose-built robots, so during the transitional period where we build these purpose-built robots, you need humanoid robots to fill in the parts where the factories were geared for human labor.
jollyllama 4mo ago
>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? Stuff that can be done by purpose specific robot arms on wheeled platforms, which is very difficult, but will be much more feasible than a humanoid robot doing anything.
- XorNot 4mo ago
  No one ever considers the physics of this situation. You can't put a robot arm on a wheeled platform without making the platform very heavy otherwise the whole thing will topple over. This gives your entire assembly a mandatory floor space requirement that may be quite large, and severely constrains how much reach you have (see the Handle robot from BD itself). A platform like the Segway with a self-balancing system can help with this, but since it doesn't have legs it has very little ability to keep the top of the platform steady - all it can do is accelerate around to try and accommodate wobbles, whereas a bipedal robot can simply shuffle it's legs around and keep the top of it's body stable. It is difficult to build a control system which can do this, but once it's done it's done.
dopa42365 4mo ago
What you need then is a better arm (or even just hand), not a human. Or a new take on car design with automated production in mind regarding all the wiring and what not (easier said than done, I'm sure many have tried and failed, but eventually someone will succeed).
not_a_bot_4sho 4mo ago
> I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.
SecretDreams 4mo ago
So we want to replace a lot of cheap human labour with expensive robots? Even if I think this has legs, where do the cheap humans go to work after? Where/what are the remaining jobs for all of this displaced labour in both white collar and blue collar worlds? It basically screams UBI. And in a UBI world, the economy looks pretty different and humanoid esque robots start to look either very altruistic or very dystopian depending on how hard the oligarchs don't want things to change. Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking?
- krapp 4mo ago
  >Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking? The market becomes more efficient as fewer human beings are needed to create value and move capital. A lot of them are going to die, surplus to requirements. A lot more will be stuck in lives of grinding and meager poverty, probably doing gig work acting as "flesh AI" for less expensive robots or "blood boys" for the rich. But the rich will be very rich indeed. It won't just be end-stage capitalism killing people, either. The collapse of the knowledge economy, scientific and research institutions and the mass adoption of AI to fill the gap will kill tons of people too, as will the return of diseases like polio and smallpox, and mass starvation as climate change destroys global agriculture, and the normalization of christofascism. We're almost certainly not getting UBI, at least not in the US. It would help too many black people and immigrants, half the country would secede. We might get something called UBI but only so long as it isn't universal, and has tons of racially biased and religiously motivated means testing and plenty of carve-outs that keep that money flowing to the top, and out of the hand of the "useless eaters."
  - koe123 4mo ago
    We were alive in an interesting time where a clerical caste of society was needed to get the most out of capital. Once this is no longer the case it could be that we return to something feudal.
WhyNotHugo 4mo ago
If the task is too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot arm to handle, why would a walking, humanoid generaic-use robot do any better?
ryukoposting 4mo ago
> What remains unautomated, then? Lots of things that don't require legs. Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  VRML may not have taken off in the 90's, but I can, today, go to https://play-cs.com/ https://play-cs.com/ and have a have a jaunt in a virtual world. There are tons of other virtual worlds to explore. Second Life is still around. It took 3 decades to get to where we are today witht that. If it takes until 2066 for humanoid robots to arrive, I won't be around to see them, but it also won't be a fantasy by then. I'm hoping it won't take quite that long, but we'll see.
  - ryukoposting 3mo ago
    You might have forgotten some of the most-funded ventures in VRML. It wasn't just "exploring virtual worlds" or whatever, they wanted VR to be the way you interact with the whole of computing. Checking emails, web browsing, chat, spreadsheets. Second Life at al are cool, but a fraction of the vision of VRML as it was presented in the '90s. Apple quite literally reheated the idea of VRML with Vision Pro, and we all saw how that went. My comparison to VRML isn't about technical feasibility; sure, on a long enough timeline, anything is possible. The problem is market fit relative to technical complexity. On a timeline long enough that humanoids become practical, it is almost certain that we will come up with other technologies along the way - technologies that will do the envisioned jobs of humanoids just as well, if not better than humanoids, and at substantially lower cost.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      Ah, I see what you're saying. The three features of a humanoid robot are two legs, two arms, and a head. Without introducing technology we haven't even thought of yet, the head is a bunch of complexity that is unecessary if designed from scratch. One 360 degree camera means no eyes on a head that needs to rotate and move with 3 degrees of freedom. As long as we're changing vision systems, cameras and lights embedded on the "hands" would make it easier to do certain kinds of jobs. The number of hands, the number of fingers on the hand are up for optimizing, along with the number of arms. Three might be optimal vs two. Maybe six? And a shelf in the middle of the chest. The other thing that defines humanoid is bipedal motion, a.k.a. having two legs. From liking around, the other options are three or four legs for six and then also wheels a.k.a. rollerblades. It's impossible to predict the reality of product market fit for the future. It sucks doing the dishes, even with the washing machine doing the work, so how about the cabinets themselves are the washing machine so you just put dishes back where they came from and they're cleaned by the cabinets. No humanoid robot maid needed. If we look at cost as the optimization driver, we really have to dig into the nitty-gritty of robotics. The big one is the amount of energy that we exert just standing there versus a humanoid robot just standing there is ridiculous. So then a centar looking thing. Or maybe one point of contact with the ground which is a ball and the machine runs balancing and hopping algorithms. Pogo stick traversal might be most efficient, given enough compute to make it feasible.

looperhacks 4mo ago

But 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 ago
Well, 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 ago
A) 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 ago
  These 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 ago
    Intelligence is absolutely a valuable addition to dexterity, but no, current industrial robots have nowhere near the dexterity of a human hand.
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    The 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.
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      > the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment I dunno, a legged design is pretty useful for navigating complex environments. The arms and legs have to attach to something so you've still got some sort of torso. About the only thing you can easily do away with is the head I think. But certainly a bipedal design seems unnecessarily complicated unless you need it to climb ladders inside narrow tubes or something similarly specific. I feel like a quadruped with 4+ arms mounted on top and many-jointed fingers might be ideal (both in terms of utility and also creepiness).
      - Symbiote 4mo ago
        In a factory, where you can guarantee a hard, smooth floor, I would think wheels are better in most cases than four feet. But of course the wheels could be replaced with feet where that's needed.
- CSSer 4mo ago
  And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.
  - boredatoms 4mo ago
    and humans collude via unions
j-pb 4mo ago
These robots operate on completely different principles. One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines. The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.
- ACCount37 4mo ago
  Pretty much. It's a total paradigm shift from how industrial robots normally work. A pre-planned motion executed carefully and precisely vs open-ended "do this thing" powered by a very large bag of opaque neural network heuristics. A robot that has to be carefully adapted and set up for the task vs a robot that you can point at a task and have it figure out how to do it. A robot that doesn't deviate vs a robot that absorbs all kinds of deviations. It's a bet that The Bitter Lesson will win over Moravec's Paradox, in the end.
- btown 4mo ago
  It's also worth noting that when e.g. inputs to a stage might have unpredictable defects or alignment, a robot arm utilizing neural networks for planning and analysis might still be the best way to handle that - without the extra degree of freedom of movement-relative-to-floor, planning can be done more rapidly, and movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly. If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.
  - j-pb 4mo ago
    > movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly That's exactly the reason why it's usually a bad idea to run a classical robot on a neural controller. If atlas bumps into something you get a small bump and maybe a broken atlas. Your average industrial robotic arm will happily yeet whatever it bumps into across the room.
suby 4mo ago
Because it is general purpose. We did not have the ability to create a single robot form which could do all of these minor, finicky, and opened ended tasks. Now that seems within reach. The nice property of humanoid robots is that the world is already made for human form, and so if you're trying to replace people naturally this is what you'd want.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
sib 4mo ago
>> how can a general purpose robot perform them better Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.
IncreasePosts 4mo ago
It's not a "general purpose" robot, it is a "human replacement" robot, with similar skills and shortcomings to a human. Humans are not general purpose. All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.

ranger_danger 4mo ago

They're just one of today's lucky ten thousand. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

ASalazarMX 4mo ago
According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.
- ranger_danger 4mo ago
  I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It explicitly says we should not be negative towards people for not knowing things.
- xboxnolifes 4mo ago
  The math on the xkcd is just wrong tbh. In multiple ways.
- jaredsohn 4mo ago
  'Everyone over 30 knows this' is a prior assumption (it is not necessarily correct; and nothing is said about shame). The comic strip is saying if above is true, then people still have to learn at some point so on average it would be around 10k people per day. I think the math is this: For people born in a given year: 4000000/365/30 = 365 people per day but you have 30 sets of those people (those born this year, those born last year, those born two years ago, etc.) So 365 * 30 = 10950. 10k is easier to say for viral purposes.

cpgxiii 4mo ago

> 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. Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/fixed gantry. Wheeled mobile manipulators are only needed in a few cases, and humanoid form-factor is only "necessary" in very few cases (and I don't think the current crop of humanoids is particularly suited to these tasks). In my opinion/experience, the impediments are that (1) the system integrators that are usually responsible for assembly-line robotics are too stupid to figure out how to apply robots to the problem, (2) the automakers themselves are often too short-sighted/stupid/unwilling to invest in increased automation (and particularly in building the in-house competency that they really need), (3) the hostile/exploitative relationship between (most) automakers and their main suppliers means that low-hanging improvements to parts/assemblies are a non-starter, and (4) the automaker C-suite (and investors) are too drawn to silver-bullet solutions (e.g. humanoids) than practical automation improvements.

fooker 4mo ago
How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
- claw-el 4mo ago
  Also, a general purpose robot vs a custom purpose robot represent very different capital investment profile for the factories?
- serf 4mo ago
  automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.
  - 4mo ago

LanceH 4mo ago

> What remains unautomated, then? And the tasks that change from day to day.

colordrops 4mo ago

Naw, the real answer is that factories have been built around human labor - they weren't built to be forward-compatible with purpose-built robots, so during the transitional period where we build these purpose-built robots, you need humanoid robots to fill in the parts where the factories were geared for human labor.

jollyllama 4mo ago

>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? Stuff that can be done by purpose specific robot arms on wheeled platforms, which is very difficult, but will be much more feasible than a humanoid robot doing anything.

XorNot 4mo ago
No one ever considers the physics of this situation. You can't put a robot arm on a wheeled platform without making the platform very heavy otherwise the whole thing will topple over. This gives your entire assembly a mandatory floor space requirement that may be quite large, and severely constrains how much reach you have (see the Handle robot from BD itself). A platform like the Segway with a self-balancing system can help with this, but since it doesn't have legs it has very little ability to keep the top of the platform steady - all it can do is accelerate around to try and accommodate wobbles, whereas a bipedal robot can simply shuffle it's legs around and keep the top of it's body stable. It is difficult to build a control system which can do this, but once it's done it's done.

dopa42365 4mo ago

What you need then is a better arm (or even just hand), not a human. Or a new take on car design with automated production in mind regarding all the wiring and what not (easier said than done, I'm sure many have tried and failed, but eventually someone will succeed).

not_a_bot_4sho 4mo ago

> I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.

SecretDreams 4mo ago

So we want to replace a lot of cheap human labour with expensive robots? Even if I think this has legs, where do the cheap humans go to work after? Where/what are the remaining jobs for all of this displaced labour in both white collar and blue collar worlds? It basically screams UBI. And in a UBI world, the economy looks pretty different and humanoid esque robots start to look either very altruistic or very dystopian depending on how hard the oligarchs don't want things to change. Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking?

krapp 4mo ago
>Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking? The market becomes more efficient as fewer human beings are needed to create value and move capital. A lot of them are going to die, surplus to requirements. A lot more will be stuck in lives of grinding and meager poverty, probably doing gig work acting as "flesh AI" for less expensive robots or "blood boys" for the rich. But the rich will be very rich indeed. It won't just be end-stage capitalism killing people, either. The collapse of the knowledge economy, scientific and research institutions and the mass adoption of AI to fill the gap will kill tons of people too, as will the return of diseases like polio and smallpox, and mass starvation as climate change destroys global agriculture, and the normalization of christofascism. We're almost certainly not getting UBI, at least not in the US. It would help too many black people and immigrants, half the country would secede. We might get something called UBI but only so long as it isn't universal, and has tons of racially biased and religiously motivated means testing and plenty of carve-outs that keep that money flowing to the top, and out of the hand of the "useless eaters."
- koe123 4mo ago
  We were alive in an interesting time where a clerical caste of society was needed to get the most out of capital. Once this is no longer the case it could be that we return to something feudal.

WhyNotHugo 4mo ago

If the task is too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot arm to handle, why would a walking, humanoid generaic-use robot do any better?

ryukoposting 4mo ago

> What remains unautomated, then? Lots of things that don't require legs. Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.

fragmede 3mo ago
VRML may not have taken off in the 90's, but I can, today, go to https://play-cs.com/ https://play-cs.com/ and have a have a jaunt in a virtual world. There are tons of other virtual worlds to explore. Second Life is still around. It took 3 decades to get to where we are today witht that. If it takes until 2066 for humanoid robots to arrive, I won't be around to see them, but it also won't be a fantasy by then. I'm hoping it won't take quite that long, but we'll see.
- ryukoposting 3mo ago
  You might have forgotten some of the most-funded ventures in VRML. It wasn't just "exploring virtual worlds" or whatever, they wanted VR to be the way you interact with the whole of computing. Checking emails, web browsing, chat, spreadsheets. Second Life at al are cool, but a fraction of the vision of VRML as it was presented in the '90s. Apple quite literally reheated the idea of VRML with Vision Pro, and we all saw how that went. My comparison to VRML isn't about technical feasibility; sure, on a long enough timeline, anything is possible. The problem is market fit relative to technical complexity. On a timeline long enough that humanoids become practical, it is almost certain that we will come up with other technologies along the way - technologies that will do the envisioned jobs of humanoids just as well, if not better than humanoids, and at substantially lower cost.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Ah, I see what you're saying. The three features of a humanoid robot are two legs, two arms, and a head. Without introducing technology we haven't even thought of yet, the head is a bunch of complexity that is unecessary if designed from scratch. One 360 degree camera means no eyes on a head that needs to rotate and move with 3 degrees of freedom. As long as we're changing vision systems, cameras and lights embedded on the "hands" would make it easier to do certain kinds of jobs. The number of hands, the number of fingers on the hand are up for optimizing, along with the number of arms. Three might be optimal vs two. Maybe six? And a shelf in the middle of the chest. The other thing that defines humanoid is bipedal motion, a.k.a. having two legs. From liking around, the other options are three or four legs for six and then also wheels a.k.a. rollerblades. It's impossible to predict the reality of product market fit for the future. It sucks doing the dishes, even with the washing machine doing the work, so how about the cabinets themselves are the washing machine so you just put dishes back where they came from and they're cleaned by the cabinets. No humanoid robot maid needed. If we look at cost as the optimization driver, we really have to dig into the nitty-gritty of robotics. The big one is the amount of energy that we exert just standing there versus a humanoid robot just standing there is ridiculous. So then a centar looking thing. Or maybe one point of contact with the ground which is a ball and the machine runs balancing and hopping algorithms. Pogo stick traversal might be most efficient, given enough compute to make it feasible.