Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- people very soon as going to look back at all of us and just think "they didn't even have robots yet! how did they even eat?" Well, future readers, it isn't easy! We either go to the store and bring back groceries ourselves or pay a helper to do it. No robot in the loop there. Then when it comes time to cook something we either have to cut it up and otherwise prepare it and then cook it ourselves, or another human can do it, or we can buy fully prepared foods that don't require cooking. And then when we're done we have to put our own dishes away into a dishwasher. We can't just say a few words and have a robot do it for us!by logicallee
- “If a self-driving car finds itself in a situation it can’t handle or suffers a glitch, it can pull over or, in the worst case, just hit the brakes.”
Wrong. Try hitting the brakes of your self driving car on highway at 65mph or during unprotected left turn with oncoming vehicles.
Or have a glitched self-driving car hit its brakes and block the road, for emergency vehicles, and endangering other people.
Self-driving cars can also suffer a glitch without knowing they suffered a glitch, like Waymo cars driving into flooded roads.
by tintor - This is why im not worried about "AI" taking over the world. Robotics still has a LONG way to go. A human can balance a plate on their arm with food while holding a glass of milk in that hand and a donut in the other and still manage to open a door, step over potential floor obstacles, maneuver tight spaces, get bumped by a child or dog, and still set it all down without spilling it 99% of the time. Just the hardware with the dexterity and responsiveness to perform the same task would cost unimaginable amounts of money to produce, not to mention the control systems needed to do it smooth and gracefully enough.
Maybe in another 2 decades I could see it possibly starting to change, but even then I wouldn't bet the horse on it until I saw it. Cars only have three degrees of freedom and even that we are barely able to get working well enough to put it into limited practice. And yet one single human finger has atleast 3 degrees of freedom, and is covered in what is the equivalent of a million tiny ultra sensitive tactile sensors.
by AngryData - I've yet to see anyone address the more immediate problem for (humaniform) robotics, which is that it runs counter to the economic benefits of specialization at industrial scales.
A robotic warehouse that's just like a human warehouse but with robots walking the aisles will always be more expensive (and likely far less efficient) than a warehouse purpose built for automated picking using standard containers and graspers, conveyer belts or path constrained wheeled platforms--something I've seen in operation 20 years ago.
A factory of general purpose robots sewing t-shirts will always be more expensive than a factory a low wage humans sitting there doing the same.
The Fourdrinier process for making flat-sheet goods (i.e., paper, thin plastic, in massive rolls) is more than two centuries old. The idea that robots, returning to dipping a mould into the furnish to create individual sheets, could even come close to the economics of modern papermaking is insane.
by fatbird - People think robots in terms of humanoid or number-5 style robots.
I think it'll be more capable appliances at first.
Like a lawn mowing device that also spots weeds and can spray them.
Next iteration has arms to rip weeds out of the garden.
Next has attachments so you can direct it to do pruning.
Next it can figure out the pruning itself and move the outcome into the woodchipper.
And so on and so on.
It's not going to be one day a humanoid robot comes into the house and does everything.
by _carbyau_ - Yes the problem is very hard. Mainly because high DOF generalization is very difficult.
We have self driving cars because what are the control inputs? Pedal, brake, steering wheel. This already took many many years.
Now for a humanoid robot: An action space that is metaphorically Hilbert. (Physically, yes, obviously)
Also, IMO, LLM's can aid the development of robots, but do little beyond a planning, human control interface. Below that it's the domain of control and the solution will be the correct combination of classical, neural, and real time optimization based control.
All the bad-ass biped robots that actually look natural? It's PID controls wrapped with control barrier functions constraining the QPs that are being solved in real time.
But that's annoying to derive per-application. So we'll need neural methods which can be learned (while being constrained by a priori knowledge of dynamics). My hunch is that the Yann LeCunn type of jepa models will be how tasks can be learned.
by kooi - Roboticist here. All of this, and he didn’t mention compliance or online adaptation to otherwise un-sensable dynamics. Or massively complex miniature mechanisms.
Current generation tactile sensors cost a couple thousand $ PER FINGER, and have a real world MTBF of hours. The cost can be solved with economy of scale. The fragility is harder.
- A marker of progress will be when Amazon converts to automated picking. They've been trying hard for almost a decade now. They had an annual competition for years. They have a decent picking robot developed in house.[1] It's not being deployed in quantity yet. Nor does it have anything like a humanoid hand. Just a two-surface gripper. Amazon's production robots are mostly automatic guided vehicles, not manipulators.
I'm impressed with how far legged locomotion has come. But as yet, nobody seems to be using legged robots for any commercial purpose beyond the demo level.
Is Tesla still going to produce vast numbers of humanoid robots by the end of 2026?
There's been a lot of progress on the hardware side. Motor technology from drones has produced much better robot motors. The sweet spot on gear reduction seems to have been found. (Too much reduction, and you can't back drive. Too little, and the motors have to be too big.) The volumes are now large enough to justify making robot-specific components. Robot arms are much better than a decade ago. So are robot legs. Control is better, too. It looks like a humanoid robot will cost about as much as a car.
But they're still not quite good enough to be useful.
We'll know they are real when an Amazon Prime truck drives up and a robot does the last 100 meters of the delivery.
by Animats