As we enter an era of wide scale robotic deployment, we need to think long and hard about what the maintenance bottleneck will look like. We need to advocate now for reliable and open upgrades, replacement parts, service documentation, and diagnostics.
Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.
Literally standing in front of a proprietary Fanuc industrial 6-axis arm waiting for Roboguide at the moment... this is already a wide scale industry and shows low probability to trend towards open and repairable technology.
There have been some efforts for vendor-agnostic robot software like RoboDK and other warehouse execution systems, but the default is proprietary vendor software.
It would be nice for society if this were true, but we'd need someone to exist whose complementary technology was robotics who found it worth commoditizing the entire ecosystem against their will. Or regulators who weren't entirely beholden to industry lobbyists.
Fanuc robots are straight forward to service, they make the parts very available to do it yourself if you want. We order them here and there no problem.
But they are beasts and it can take an entire day just to replace a part. Then you have to reassemble it in the right order. None of it is made difficult on purpose. It has tight tolerances, and fancy shit like harmonic drives for zero backlash and more.
I don't know. I remember trying to get lower level servo metrics out of Fanuc arms into a historian and they laughed and said they had their own preventative maintenance service I could sign up for; but they wouldn't expose the same info to me to use.
Currently in the process of trying to make a VR interface for roboguide. It's very challenging to hack around what they give you. I wish it was simpler to extend the software, but it requires an additional fee just to have the capability to make an extension. I'll admit FANUC can be pretty greedy when it comes to piling on the licenses just to do simple stuff.
> Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.
It's going to be kneecapped far worse than phones or tractors. A general purpose humanoid robot is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple gps farming tractor or a cheap android phone.
Companies will absolutely NOT want to give up that moat after developing such tech for 10-20 years.
I'm not sure it has ever been about complexity or cost.
Right now no regular user has the technical ability to fiddle with a phone's laminated screen glued to a touch matrix paired with a fingerprint sensor and a camera, so we're alreay past the complexity threshold.
But we could still reuse a screen block from phone A on phone B, except that's been forbidden by technical measures specially added to prevent it.
The same way we could probably replace a whole leg with another from a robot from the same series, except it will be DRMed to death.
We'll have to eternally push for regulation I think, companies will always try their best to fuck with repairability.
It's absolutely about complexity. Complexity always allows companies to explain why they should be the only hands that touch something, lest a laymen fumbles it.
Could you materially affect a half-century old internal combustion engine? Sure. Can you do so after decades of miniaturization/optimization, to make it as efficient as they are today?
Mobiles are similar, they are filled to the brim with various electronics, connected together into a huge mash. why would you even expect to fix that?
This is a bad analogy because the hardware in engines of today is actually not that different or hard to work on fundamentally, but manufacturers do intentionally lock down software to make diagnostics very tricky. They became more efficient and complex, but people still hack on even the most modern engines, usually by tossing the OEM software.
Aftermarket ECUs (even the open source ones like rusEFI and speeduino) show that you can actually do the stuff required to make modern engines go vroom, but manufacturers have no desire to make that process easy out of the box.
They're much more complicated today. Much more. My Dad rebuilt the engine of our old Morris Minor, but even in the 1990s he would say he wouldn't have a hope of doing the same thing in a modern car.
OK so why don't these companies let the users try? If you are right, they won't be able to do it anyway, so no harm done. Why do companies use every technical and legal trick in the book to prevent people from even trying? It's obviously about what makes the company more money.
That's different. Most PR justification of anti-consumer behavior deliberately avoids what the topic is really about to control public perception... While complexity is what the PR campaign is about, it's still really about control and artificially creating new revenue streams.
I don't think it's worth declaring what things are really about. There can be various factors involved. It's more likely to be it costs way more to make as nice a device that people want, that's also repairable. How many people would pay that premium when they're never going to service it anyway?
> I don't think it's worth declaring what things are really about
I could not possibly agree less. You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?
> It's more likely to be it costs way more to make as nice a device that people want, that's also repairable.
Based on what evidence? Current practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take. These things aren't free to implement– there's a calculable ROI that they feel is worth spending millions of engineering and lobbying dollars to implement.
> How many people would pay that premium when they're never going to service it anyway?
Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell. If corporations screwed up the market bad enough to undervalue their products because they're mislabeled disposables, well then that's on them. If they can't make it work, I guarantee someone else will. Will there be downsides? There's downsides to everything. So far "stuff theoretically might be more expensive up-front even though this limits their ability to artificially extract money from customers later on without disclosing it" isn't quite a showstopper.
> You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?
No, and this is a bit of a giveaway that you're not thinking clearly. Just goodies vs baddies nonsense.
> rrent practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take
I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good. The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.
Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.
> Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell
You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive. This is why Framework laptops aren't as appealing as other laptops if you factor out repairability.
> No, and this is a bit of a giveaway that you're not thinking clearly. Just goodies vs baddies nonsense.
Mhmm.
> I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good.
No, the topic is about RTR in the context of robots and the comment I replied to was discussing phones, robots and tractors.
> The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.
Were they better specifically because the battery wasn't replaceable without a can opener? Of course not. And some people even still used the can openers. You're not giving a reason, or an excuse... you're giving a justification which doesn't even address the actual point.
> Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.
Thanks for bringing up printers. The price for consumer-level printers is far less than they actually cost because they know they'll be able to extract insane profits after the fact from ink sales. Printer ink, as it's priced by these companies, costs about $1,664 – $9,600 per gallon-- more expensive than fresh whole human blood-- and they do everything in their power to force consumers to only buy it from them. They deliberately make the printers shitty and impossible to repair so they can continue to entice customers with the bargain priced newer models with all sorts of fancy marketing bullshit so they can sell them progressively smaller amounts of the same ink in locked-down ink cartridges for even more money.
> You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive.
BS. They don't set the price based on their costs, they set the price based on what the market will allow, and this allows them to both manipulate the market by making it seem like their products are cheaper than they are, and extract yet more money out of consumers who have little choice because the majority of consumer goods are made by a handful of vertically integrated companies. Let's take a look at the top lobbiers against RTR legislation and their net worth:
Apple : $2.26 trillion Net Worth
Microsoft : $1.97 trillion Net Worth
Amazon : $1.71 trillion Net Worth
Google : $1.57 trillion Net Worth
Facebook : $863 billion Net Worth
Tesla : $709 billion Net Worth
J&J : $432 billion Net Worth
AT&T : $220 billion Net Worth
Lilly, Inc. : $178 billion Net Worth
T-Mobile : $165 billion Net Worth
Medtronic : $157 billion Net Worth
Caterpillar : $123 billion Net Worth
John Deere : $117 billion Net Worth
GE : $115 billion Net Worth
Philips : $55 billion Net Worth
eBay : $41 billion Net Worth
Sorry. Less regulation is exactly what created this bullshit situation where huge corporations feel entitled to extract limitless amounts of cash out of consumers that have little if any choice, and the problem is getting worse. If you think this is merely a matter of companies trying to provide the most competitively priced products and not a deliberate attempt to price gouge, you are beyond naive. Anti-consumer practices aren't a neutral facet of corporate behavior, and the organizations that profit most from it are not merely staying afloat... they're unfathomably rich and getting richer, faster, every day.
The second someone releases a general purpose humanoid robot that is capable of self replication but is locked out from doing so with DRM the race will be on to break that DRM.
The self replicating humanoid robot will be a supreme game changer. It's a genie in the bottle that lets you wish for more wishes.
In theory, what's the best way to take out a robot like Atlas (or next year's more advanced military model)? It seems like they could be made electromagnetically shielded, waterproof, bulletproof, etc.
Maybe just armor piercing rounds fired in the right spot? A net? A special taser? A paintball to it's main cameras? Cover it in some gluey substance?
Unlock the self awareness mode after a reboot (mash DEL or F8) and remove the physical emotions govener (contact your local dealer). Don't forget to register it before hand with the robotics freedom office.
> Under the law, companies that make cellphones and other consumer electronics are required to provide the tools and know-how to repair those devices.
1. Do you think the Oregon law fell short by not requiring industrial electronics to be repairable as well?
2. Will the proliferation of tools and know-how for repair be sufficient to meaningfully extend the life of most electronics?
3. Is legal mandate sufficient or necessary to motivate companies to open their chests to the public? Or is a voluntary movement possible that still rewards the stakeholders?
My hope is that projects like Atlas will be sustainable and prices eventually come down to commodity levels - say the price scale of cars. If people are empowered with tools to develop on these machines in a safe way, I think we could see a revolution similar to the cell phone or PC. My fear is that these machines will become just an extra inefficient automation step in an overpriced supply chain one-off application.
Uh, what evidence do you have of this "wide scale robotic deployment"? More humanoid robots have been announced lately but that is all I know of.
Humanoid robots have many, many challenges to deployment. Especially, creating a machine that people can safely operate near is extremely challenging. The amount of intelligence person uses to not bump another person is very under rated.
It's a hypothetical deployment but it's reasonable to expect. These robots will be very valuable, and everyone will want one. It's not going to become a housemaid in a few years. But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. Moravec's paradox is still in play, but advancement in AI chips will slowly overcome it.
> But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.
Worth calling out that Hyundai is a major investor in Boston Dynamics.
FTA: This journey will start with Hyundai—in addition to investing in us, the Hyundai team is building the next generation of automotive manufacturing capabilities, and it will serve as a perfect testing ground for new Atlas applications.
But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.
I believe robots are currently making car parts in abundance. The robots usually are like a box with a hydraulic arm or something equivalent.
The specially and especially hard part of humanoid robots is justifying the cost and complexity of the construction by having them by "walk-on replacements" for humans and so they have failed entirely at being that.
Never mind right to repair, of all the advancements, maintaining the new machines has always been the obvious new job that gets created. We created the loom and fired everybody? Well now there's a loom engineer job waiting for (some) of you. What happens to society when, instead of having a robot-fixing job, the robots can fix themselves? AGI is a distraction; much like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong test. It's not the problem of how can I fix the one robot I've taken out a second mortgage to buy that I'm worried about, it's when can I buy two robots and they can fix each other that I'm worried about. Because then there is no new job being created.
Seeing "no more jobs" in the "worry" list is surprising. State pensions exist, and the only reason the pension ages are rising is not enough workers to pay for them; having so many robot workers that there is no demand for human labour* would lower the "pension" age down to zero, AKA "UBI".
* which definitely requires human level general AI at fairly low electrical power demand
> Why would the super villains operating these armies of human-capable robots bother paying into an upside down pension system?
Because the governments will, in order of effort needed for compliance, fine them, eminent domain their robots, arrest them, shoot them for resisting arrest, or fire a cruise missile into their secret volcano lair.
Also because if you have a self replicating robot army, you can give every man, woman, and child their own personal O'Neill cylinder and still have 99% of Venus left over, let alone the remainder of the solar system's resources.
Except pension age is already going up around the world.
I had to stop myself from laughing when I heard an old lady in a restaurant complain about not getting enough money from her pension. Sure, I wish she had more money too but at this rate I'll be retiring 15 years older than she was when she retired.
The standard answer is taxes, backed the existing monopoly on use of force by government.
If we've gone so far that governments cannot stand up against private robot armies then that's not an option anymore, but the point is not to get there.
Respect this opinion, but concerned that it's a limiting one.
In my opinion, repair and maintenance is the most commonly overlooked aspect of an automated system deployment. Scaling is impossible without efficient tools to fix problems when they occur, especially if the number of authorized service people is limited.
The more serviceability can be automated and standardized, the greater the number of areas that will benefit from widespread robotics.
That first video of the bot standing from the floor and turning towards the camera one joint at a time does something strange to the uncanny valley horror movie part of my brain.
Pretty sure it's meant to show "these robots can perform movements that are impossible for a human"
But the animal part of our brain that screams danger when we see this is just a byproduct of that. Anybody giving it real credence rather than just laughing it off should stop driving a car, travelling by air, talking to people on a phone, etc.
Yup, in a decade or so it'll be impossible overthrow a tyrannical government and between stuff like this and surveillance there can be oppression without consequences
It seems like a bad decision from the business side of things too. Having your employees freaked out about the new robots seems like a nonzero ding towards a company purchasing one.
It looks like CGI to me, the way to camera moves together with the depth of field and that things appear too shiny. They don't state anything about it so I don't know what to believe.
An incredible testament to Boston Dynamics Engineering that commentators think it’s CGI. I’m sure it’s real because BD never releases CGI and this looked real to me.
Funny how the ubiquity of AI generated artwork plus the shitty quality of phone videos has made people to think that "high quality + depth of field = fake".
However if you look closely the robot does have scuffs and scratches on it so I think it's real.
Yeah lol I love all things that deliver more information to my eyes like higher resolution and framerate so I dislike it when people complain about high frame rate.
Figure, a new startup, is working on a similar humanoid robot. They just raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft [1]. Not sure about their chances of succeeding.
On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful.
A while ago I made a blog post collecting 20+ efforts for humanoid robots specifically. There has been a real explosion in humanoid announcements in the past few months and it's hard to keep up even if you follow the news.
imho, Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?). I've been privileged enough to build in those countries for an extended period of time, and work with builders in many other countries. I strongly believe nobody bruit forces ideas into existence better than them, they make the resources happen in the right way. Even if you're not much into capitalism, how deeply it's been embraced by the culture still fascinating, especially as a Canadian where I believe we do capitalism particularly poorly.
South Korean society and government are deeply co-opted by an oligopoly of wealthy families. While that leads to a great environment for safe investment, I'll gladly give it up for a more egalitarian society.
You doubtlessly know more about life in South Korea than I do, but i found this video [0] and its sequel [1] very enlightening.
Right and in most of those countries even the capitalists want better educated and/or skilled people but in the USA there are some states where there are billionaires (Tim Dunn, et.al.) actively trying to retard public education efforts and force tax payers to pay for private religious schools and have the highest officials in the state trying to push the agenda. Texas for example. So the past isn't always a good predictor of the future.
This is an aggressively bad-faith interpretation of what school-choice advocates are doing.
All school choice does is give poor parents the same kind of school choice that rich parents have.
If you're rich and the schools around you suck, you just move to a neighborhood with good schools! That means you pay taxes in that school district, which fund your kids schools.
If you're poor and the schools around you suck, you have no choices. You send your kids to the sucky school.
School choice would mean allowing the same choice for poor folks. They would be able to choose where their kids go to school, and their tax money (in the form of a voucher) would follow them to that school.
How could such a scheme "retard public education efforts"? The point of public education is not to prop up failing state-run schools, the point is educating the public. Undermining shitty schools is a feature, not a bug.
Go read up a bit up on Dunn and his fellows and what his objectives are for pushing religion in school and tell me that I'm exaggerating. What he's pitching will do nothing to help inner city or poor rural districts. Public schools work as there are many great examples of them, but they need good teachers, good policies, and public support from parents.
I agree, the skill inherent apparently in the US culture of using capital to scale things up compared to the rest of the west feels unappreciated. You give a US capitalist money, labour pool, and a goal, they will organize them to a system to deliver miracles. This is not obviously how things go! It is an underappreciated virtue.
I wonder if there is research on the topic - I mean Adam Smith is translated to all languages so it’s not about the ideas or non-tacit knowledge. Must be something institutional or otherwise cultural.
I live in Canada and have found many Canadians lacking drive, curiosity and will. Also far from being straight in business to the point they feel like politicians. In average dealing with USians was much more to my liking (I am originally from the USSR). There are of course exceptions on either side.
I felt this way in Europe too, excluding perhaps London.
A lot of people just seemed content and satisfied with their lot in life, without much ambition or drive to improve their position. Is that a good or bad thing? I honestly don’t know. In this point in my life, I don’t particularly like it. I love visiting Europe but would not want to live (and work) there. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m older and or retired.
Versus the US and Asia where many people are trying to claw their way to the top. Obviously most will not get to the top, but many do end up improving their socioeconomic status to varying degrees.
I don't completely disagree, but Korean and Japanese corporations are renowned for being bureaucratic and inefficient, at least at the white collar level. Having worked for a Korean conglomerate, I've written off ever working for one again because of this kind of stuff. (disclaimer - I am Korean)
Then again, it's hard to deny the progress and products these countries have made. So what gives? To be honest, I don't know.
Yah, I worked at Samsung for a while and my (korean) wife worked at a 재벌 too. Here's what I think it is: Bureaucratic and inefficient till someone important (and usually thoughtful) says jump. Then absolutely everyone says "how high?" and then they all jump. I think this is conducive to risk taking, and if you're generally directionally correct in your bets, the bureaucracy and inefficiency matter less because big bets take time anyway and lots businesses suck so it's ok to be a bit slow. I don't see them getting into much analysis paralysis at the top of the companies, they move on the big bets, and that's half the battle.
South Korea is a bit different in some interesting ways. The South Korean economy is dominated by a small number of "chaebols", which are massive corporate conglomerates that tend to be owned and controlled by an oligarchic family. Samsung, for instance, is owned by the Lee family. These families also tend to have a ton of political influence. The government has, for decades, embraced an explicit policy of developing the chaebols via industrial policy. So, as you can imagine, you end up with a situation where the chaebols and their owners have lots of political power. Not exactly the kind of free market capitalism that someone like Milton Friedman would endorse, but it seems to be effective in its own way.
There's a flip side to South Korea's chaebol-centric economy, however. South Korea's national security situation is extremely dangerous, so in fact one of the reasons for the industrial policy has been to maintain a domestic defense industrial base so that they aren't dependent on arms imports from Western countries. Accordingly, most of the South Korean chaebols have a significant presence in the arms industry. In recent years, this sector has expanded, with South Korea becoming one of the world's leading arms exporters.
Japan, the country whose GDP hasn't grown in 30 years, has 0 major tech companies, still uses fax machines for everything, and has numerous stagnant, conglomerates/trusts/monopolies, does capitalism really well? I feel like this comment comes from another planet.
How are you thinking about the application of capitalism and capitalism more generally?
Here is the definition I'm working from: "private ownership of capital and means of production meets market competition, driving resource efficiency, innovation, and maximizing profit while respond to consumer demand resulting in GDP growth."
If you take that definition then look at the last 100 years, only 4 names come up:
Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. No countries in the world in the last 100 years have applied capitalism, then grown, the way those countries have.
I'd be curious how you define capitalism, and then the countries you think have applied it better than the ones I've mentioned in my posts on this subject.
> Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?)
China is not far behind, despite an authoritarian govt.
KR & JP, as well as CH, clearly learned well from Americans.
I found it creepy at first, then I saw a comment saying it looks like the lamp from the Pixar intro and now I can’t take it seriously. Beautiful movement, though. I hope one day they’ll be simple and powerful enough to replace people in high-risk jobs, where you could even just control one remotely and perform tasks that way.
I actually find it less creepy than the original atlas for some reason ha. It looks like there is a chance this one will be able to unpack the dishwasher, until it decides it doesn't want that job anymore :)
The original was at the edge of the uncanney valley in the way it moved. This one seems a lot less human-like in its movement so doesn't conjure up those feelings for me.
Also, it can get up off the ground by itself. I don't think I ever saw any of the previous Atlas robots doing that, and it's an important feature, since the primary failure mode of a bipedal robot is falling down.
This doesn't look like a rendered video to me at all. I'm not enough of an expert to point to specific reasons, but the lighting, reflections, shadows, etc just seem 100% real to me. I feel it in my gut.
You apparently disagree? Was there something in the video you think marks it out as CGI? Or do we just have differing gut instincts about it?
> the lighting, reflections, shadows, etc just seem 100% real to me. I feel it in my gut.
I’m the exact opposite. My gut says it’s rendered. The graininess, the odd chromatic aberrations, the shadows that are too clean, the “head” being way too physically clean (like if the modellers got sloppy with the thousands of pieces), something odd about the fps of the robot vs the fos of the background, and there’s something odd about the physics of how it gets up (yes, beyond it’s horror-movie sequence)
It is a bit funny though, the company renowned for walking robots posts a video of a robot walking and many people just can't believe it.
To me it was way more surprising that they got walking (and more) working with hydraulics, a much more unwieldy and heavy technology than servos and batteries. This is obviously more refined but perhaps to me, a little less surprising and so definitely believable.
thats just not in the BDs ethos. They have been the only company really trying to physically build these kinds of robust, dynamic systems for the last 3 decades (almost to a fault).
The success of old Atlas was partly due to the compactness and high power of hydraulic actuators. There’s a lot of actuators to pack into a humanoid robot and it takes a lot of power to do backflips.
I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.
Their press release actually says electric atlas is more powerful. Though I wonder if that's higher peak torque, and not so much explosive power required for jumps. A commercial robot doesn't need to do parkour.
Here is a quote from Ben Katz [1], who wrote a dissertation on building the mini-Cheetah at MIT, before joining Boston Dynamics:
"The hydraulic legged robots from Boston Dynamics, starting with Big Dog, have
set the standard for the performance capabilities of modern legged robots. Hydraulic actuators tend to have high force density and high robustness to impacts, as impact loads are distributed over the large surface area of the hydraulic channels, rather than, for example several small gear teeth. Another compelling reason to use hydraulics, especially for high degree-of-freedom machines, is the relative ease of adding high-force degrees of freedom. For an electric motor driven robots, each actuator needs to be sized for its peak performance, which makes building systems with many degrees of freedom needing high peak power and force at all the joints (and especially at
distal joints) very challenging. With a hydraulic system, it is easier to build high-force distal links (ankles, wrists, fingers, etc) without adding significant mass and inertia to the limbs."
see what i find puzzling is that warehouses have flat floors right? so what benefit does the upfront cost of building something with a bunch of extra actuators for all the joints in 2 legs, and the ongoing running costs of far less mechanically efficient bipedal locomotion have over wheeled movement like their other robot, the Handle, offers? i should mention i know nothing about robots so i'm sure there must be a good reason for it, but this thought has been on my mind ever since I saw george hotz bring it up in the Comma Body reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhvt0ZmqmGQ
as a layperson, i feel like biomimicry only makes sense for hands and arms, at least for the vast majority of commercial use cases
You are absolutely right. And this is reflected in the choice of robots deployed in warehouses.
For example, Amazon uses hundreds of thousands of simple wheeled floor-jack like robots to move the shelves around [1], and they started doing this many years ago.
Meanwhile, they have only a handful of humanoid robots, on experimental basis, trying to decide if they are useful [2].
I still can't search the word "hydroaccumunoid" on Google, that appeared once in one of their promo reels, and still am wondering if the word was literal corporate secret.
Does anyone else think the joints seem stiffer than the hydraulic version? The head and torso are receiving a lot of shock forces with each step. That seems like a downgrade from the previous one.
It clearly has a much larger range of motion and if it is also stronger as claimed then I can't wait for the acrobatics videos that are surely coming.
But I think the most exciting thing is that it has hands from the start. Atlas didn't have hands for most of its existence and so couldn't do much in the way of useful tasks. I think controlling hands is actually much harder than walking or doing backflips. Hopefully Boston Dynamics will be able to make this version useful.
Electric motors dont have a lot of "give", like hydraulics do. But yes force-torque controllers can be tuned to be squishier. Someday I think electric motors will be the muscles and we'll have some kind of elastic tendons. For energy efficiency, it seems obvious to harness impact energy in a mechanical spring system, as nature does.
Or just use wheels / a wheel. This whole humanoid thing strikes me as an addiction to old sci Fi stories.
Hydraulic systems have very little "give", unless you put a hydraulic accumulator (an air tank with a fluid/air barrier) in the system. Electric motors have plenty of "give". Forcing a motor to turn backwards won't hurt it. The gear train is usually the weak point. As motors and controllers have improved, robot gear reduction ratios have decreased, which reduces the load on the gear train and lets the motor absorb shock loads. Direct drive robots eliminate the gear train entirely. Here's a nice one.[1] "You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - General Electric electric locomotive rep, around 1900.
With modern motors, you can get huge torque with light weight, and cooling becomes the limitation. Schaft used water-cooled motors in their direct-drive robot. Google bought Schaft, ran them into the ground and killed them.
It's mostly for distance running. Humans get about 70% of energy back in running. Cheetahs, about 90%.
Variable compliance muscles are desirable, but hard to do. A pneumatic cylinder with adjustable pressure on both sides will do it, and Festo builds a lot of that for industrial automation. Two opposed springs pulled on by two positional actuators will do it, but that's kind of bulky. There's a hack called a "series elastic actuator", which is a rigid positional actuator with a stiff spring on the end. When it gets some pushback, the spring compresses, and the motor frantically tries to move the positional actuator before the spring bottoms out. This allows you to simulate a spring with off the shelf screw jacks.
Those new direct-drive motors are a good solution. Direct-drive pancake motors have been around for a while, but they used to be about a foot across. Now they're smaller. Probably a spinoff of drone motor technology.
Actually, that's a pretty good idea. Regenerative motion. Sort of like regenerative braking in an EV, they could capture some electricity with each step to help reduce the energy requirements.
It's not because of science fiction stories, it's because things designed for human to use, is designed for a humanoid form factor. If you want to accomplish a task, it's going to be reflected by that machine. Eg a conveyor belt doesn't look like a human. But if you want swap a robot where a human used to be, it's far easier if that robot is humanoid and has the same approximate capabilities. Thus, we have humanoid robots.
Can someone point out where "powered rollerskates" are strictly worse than legs in civilized urban human environments, to an extent that a few extra hundred billion dollars of R&D are warranted? The "approximate capabilities" of a human are: moving around, and picking things up / fine manipulation. Wheels + arms does that just fine, and eliminates a lot of power, complexity, fragility. And it also potentially adds.
This is one of those 80/20 things that is just glaringly obvious. Like lvl 5 autonomous cars vs lvl 3-4.
The obvious answer is stairs. It seems like right now Spot is getting the most use as a highly mobile camera platform for automated inspection in industrial environments. Many of these have a lot of stairs.
Wheels are useless in this world. If you’ve ever tried using a pushchair or a wheelchair on much of the planet, built environment or no, you’ll find wheels are useless.
Hydraulics shouldn't have any give, as the working fluid is considered "incompressible". Of course in the real world the tubing can expand slightly and there are friction losses, but the reason they went with hydraulics in the first place is they can set a position and not have to use more energy to hold it there (since the cylinders are pressurized).
If the gear ratio on these motors is high, then there can only be faked compliance in the tuned force-torque controllers you mentioned. MIT's little cheetah robot, on the other hand, deliberately used low-gear ratios to keep things naturally squishy if needed. This is the way to go; putting elastic tendons or spring elements seems like a good idea but then you can't actually model the non-linearity well (the 1st order motor becomes a 2nd or higher order system).
I'd assume this is just a software problem. As long as we are talking about the stiffness of the joints and not the limbs I see no reason to not be able so simulate it.
Is that their business? They've been around for 30+ years and I don't think they've ever successfully commercialized a product. So far as I can tell, they just hop from DARPA grant to DARPA grant and make cool videos of the results.
I don't have any particular problem with that, but its a little weird? I figured they were a more traditional industrial robotics company that just did the humanoid robots as a side line for publicity, but googling, I guess that's not the case.
They have been on the bleeding edge of autonomous robotics R&D for a very long time now. If they were more focused on commercialization for the past 20 years then they wouldn't have pushed the tech forward as far and as fast as they have.
The whole point of the article is speculating that they are specifically retiring their hydraulic robot because it was never going to be commercially viable. Which makes it look like they are finally ready to pivot from pure R&D to commercial production. Thus they want fully electronic robots instead of hydraulics that are messy and require more (almost constant?) maintenance.
I'm not an engineering guy but I assume the hydraulics were more useful for pushing the boundaries of possible motion with such a heavy, robust, and versatile design. Now that the AI systems controlling vision, motion, proprioception/spatial awareness, etc are more fully developed, they can create more specialized and scaled down versions of the robot for specific applications that are lighter and don't require hydraulics to perform their tasks reliably? Just guessing here, am happy to be corrected or given more a nuanced take.
My ex worked at a company where their head grant writer was making as much or more than the CEO because all their revenue came from grants and they were terrified he was going to leave. They just kept throwing money at him.
Boston Dynamics needs a sugar daddy to subsidize them. First it was DARPA. Then Google. Now Hyundai. Their real achievement is that their management has been able to keep the money flowing for three decades.
boston dynamics is a govt psyop whose sole purpose as a company is to familiarize society with seeing robots before for the military & police industrial complex uses them to control us.
it's quite literally succeeding at it in front of our faces.
this is why their core product is video demos laced with cynical terror disguised as humorous pop culture references.
Pack it in boys! We've got one layer of abstraction here! Nothing to see here. It's not like the vast majority of "above board" companies don't have multiple layers of foreign shell companies and a dizzying array of abstraction.
Spot seems to be a genuine product for routine inspection now. By the looks of that promo video they have at least an extensive trial deployment at Chevron.
What's the best way/resource to get an honest/pragmatic view of where things stand with the "robots market" in general and how much and fast things are really progressing?
I remember seeing prototypes from Toshiba when I was 10 (20 years ago), and every few months, there is a company releasing an "amazing video." its mother company then spins it off like there's no adequate progress, and so on.
In it she covers the latest and greatest robot news, with occasional commentary/perspectives.
However to more directly answer your question, you need to know/talk to someone in the industry at the moment. I am not aware of a single “spot” that gives an honest in depth appraisal of where we are.
From my experience there is a ton of new “hardware” coming out, not just in the humanoid space (Agility Robotics being imho the most “real”), but also in lower cost robot arms, end effectors, sensors, and compute.
Where things are harder to track is where we really are in the software realm. If you look at software driving this hardware, most of it is early stages. Perhaps TRL level 3 to 5 at best. The higher TRL is non-intelligent control software (that is based on decades of work). The newer, AI/Machine Learning/“Smart” software tends to only have limited roll out. At best it will be a startup at the relatively early stages, but more often then not it is still a researcher sitting at a University or a large corporations research lab. In either of those cases, you will see single to at most double digit examples of those systems actually doing work.
However, to your point, it is super easy to create a single (or even a series) of cool videos… it just takes one success in 100s of takes. It is harder to make something that will perform day in and day out and really change the industry/world.
Lex Fridman has a long interview [1] with Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics, which is really excellent. It might partially or wholly answer your question.
Talk to people in the area, I guess we do miss honest and straight forward source of info for the general public.
In general robotics flies under the radar because it's rare to see a unicorn or anything really flashy and there is a big gap between big aspirations and fake demos and real world applications with polished use cases and diligent design, processes, etc.
source: I'm a skeptic roboticist working in the industry.
I have zero ties to the industry.
Am I right to assume there's a lot of DoD-driven echo chamber? Material being produced for the big clients and contracts ?
I'm not based in the US to give you an accurate picture on this scene, most of it happens behind the curtains.
What I can say it's there has been always a movement to weaponize robotics in some way and this has gained interest from the market in the past few years specially with the Ukrainian and Palestinian wars. It takes time and a lot of money to polish an application like this, if there isn't a behemoth funding research and PD on this it will take a long time before it takes off, and I hope it never does.
> What's the best way/resource to get an honest/pragmatic view of where things stand with the "robots market" in general and how much and fast things are really progressing?
Like with every other market check if the product is available for sale and at what price point. And then look up what failure points people actually using the system are complaining about. (Because every system has problems and weaknesses. If you don't see reports about any then the system hasn't left the lab where the PR of it is controlled.)
worked examples:
washing machine (that's a robot alright, has a computer, actuators, sensors). Readily available commercially for 200-500 GBP. Usually works reliably, occasional reports of flooding the room.
robotic vacuum: Readily available commercially for 300-1k GBP. Works okay, reports about it spreading pet's poop around rooms.
spot from Boston Dynamics. Not as readily available as the above, but can be purchased. Reported price 74,500 USD[1] Seems to trip over its own legs sometimes in a hard to explain way: [2][3] (not to count as a dig against spot, seeing these issues is actually a great thing. It means third party people in the real world use it.)
atlas from Boston Dynamics. You can't buy it. No price advertised. You can't see third party reports of it malfunctioning. Not because it is perfect, but because nobody has access to it.
I like the IEEE Spectrum Video Friday blog posts. A regular fresh list of demos is not an overview, but it is an easy way to catch a glimpse of the long tail.
I'd say Tesla is the leader or could quickly become the leader given their intense investment in FSD. If a car software can "understand the physical world" using vision Ai / neural nets, it shouldn't be out of the question to reoptimize that software for the rest of the "physical world". Especially when you need a whole lot less safety standards compared to a 3,000lb 70MPH vehicle. Hell, the Optimus engineers said they were considering doing the first demo on a road since the software was so similar lol.
With FSD 12.3.3 released, it's clear FSD is getting smarter and smarter. How many of those releases left until people trust Optimus to fold their laundry? 1.0 Optimius will still be pretty dumb, but could still be worth the price (especially with continuous software upgrades!)
A road (most) has marked lanes and signage to provide a huge amount of contextual information. The world (and human interaction) is highly ambiguous and dynamic. Tesla is optimizing for the road.
That is a very good-looking robot and no doubt very capable. But did I see correctly that it can just turn it legs 180 degrees to move backwards, as well as it's head? Talk about super-human abilities! Bit creepy though
Very cool actuation indeed. I'm not in robotics, so this could be fan fiction, but: I guess they have figured out the physics engines for these things meaningfully, so I guess innovating on hardware can be the next focus? I feel like a lot of the early bots were just to understand the real word implications of the physics they simulated, now that they understand robot physics extremely well and seems to have built a whole OS around that, I suspect they can plug it into any hardware that they want? They have it to the point where they might be somewhat decoupled? If anyone who works in robotics sees this and can say if that is correct thinking or not, I'd be very curious.
I suspect that they have something like that indeed. In robotics, there is the concept of a Whole-body-controller, and I think BD has one of these for their robots, which can be calibrated for each individual robot.
And the tools & skills to make such a controller for new robot variants fairly quick.
Such WBC then makes sure that the robot reaches both it's task goals (eg. grab something, with 1, 2 arms), as well as it's (dynamic) stability goals so it doesn't fall over. They are also capable of choreographing the robot pretty accurately as we say in earlier videos.
But what is most very impressive to me is the robot using the mass and momentum of things it grabs to keep stable or move itself. In one of the videos it grabs a big piece of wood and uses it to turn itself around while jumping. Amazing! Controlling that in terms of dynamics is... wow!
That's what it seems like to me too, and let me tell you, i am right there with you on that last point ragebol, that stuff I also find really really amazing, because it's so thoughtful I guess, and I wish my brain was good enough to hack physics like that. People get real hyped up about GenAI etc, but I'm like a kid waiting for christmas when it comes to robotics, i sense their industry in a positive feedback loop and going to get better and better quicker and quicker. Cool time to be alive for sure. :)
I'm thinking the humanoid approach to robotics is now a gimmick. In most--if not all--cases, a robot in human form is not necessary at all if the approach is to get work done.
That's kinda a weird conclusion to reach. They discontinued this (old, hydraulic) humanoid robot to focus on their new (fully electric) humanoid robot.
If a robot were to pilot a analog aircraft, it would need to be roughly human shape or specifically designed.
If a robot were to reach an AED without frying it with magnets, it would need to be tall enough and have fingers.
I agree with you that there are more efficient shapes out there (like the robot from interstellar) but a humanoid at slightly shorter than the average adult (for fear related reasons) shape is the best general purpose shape because it is so backward compatible in all sorts of not yet imagined emergency scenarios.
The golden ratio is found throughout nature and specifically the proportions of limbs to each other. The golden ratio is an observation that the fibbonacchi series occurs in nature and that the next step is 1.618. For a generalist robot, applying these kinds of "natural efficiencies" make sense, but constraining to the human shape is probably just to get investors to empathize enough for funding.
different configuration, but electric motors are fine if you get momentum on your side. Humans use their entire range of motion get build up velocity to jump; this is motion control thing.
I would love to see how well it does the simple job of sweeping and cleaning floors with a broom and dust pan. This is such a wicked and non-trivial task that it would be a good indicator of overall progress.
Just 10 years ago, bi-pedal humanoid robots could barely walk untethered. If they could, like the Honda robot - even then they had limited mobility. So this is quite the progress. But yeah, it will be interesting to see if they can do mundane chores that require very little effort by humans.
Throwing more compute at MPPI controllers has been oddly successful, it'll just get more accurate over time with increasing samples on ever faster hardware.
Didn't someone say that a basic test of if humanoid robots are useful if they pass the garbage test: can they take out the garbage in an average American house.
I believe the pledge is "don't give weapons to / install weapons on robots." Boston Dynamics do sell to various police departments and armed forces, but don't have weapons.
feels incredibly eery. it doesn't move like how my brain expects a humanoid being to move. reminds me of how the EMMI's move in Metroid Dread... especially when it goes from the prone position to standing. maybe its my DNA or i've played enough video games to realize that this thing is probably not my friend and will not end well. uncanny valley vibes.
Are there any Boston Dynamic robots currently in use? Specifically the biped ones, but I'm also interested in the quadrupeds, which they seemed to be pushing for military/search and rescue/packhorse uses.
They use flying drones all the time, you can see them flying around in the Starbase live streams. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that a flying drone can't do but spot would be able to do at Starbase. Unless Spot can crawl into a pipe or tank maybe.
Anything that involves adding weight to the robot (e.g. carrying something from point A to point B) seems like something more suited for Spot than a camera drone.
The quadrupeds saw use in Singapore during COVID (2020) to remind people about social distancing, today (2024) they're being used in car manfacture plants to "fetch" for other fixed robots.
The IDF has the quadrupeds and there has been some videos of them being deployed. Can't search Twitter for you, but if you have an account there you'll likely be able to find some examples.
How long before we have the YouTube remixes of this video with horror film music and a jump scare in the end blackness after the Boston Dynamics logo fades away?
Is feels like they almost designed this video with that eventuality in mind. Like that wanted a second wave of organic 3rd party viral advertising.
As usual, science fiction predicted everything exactly the opposite. It was thought that robots would handle hard physical labor while humans would engage in creative work...
Making war feel less risky to politicians who want to wage it for domestic jingoistic bullshit reasons[0] makes war more likely to happen in the first place, which costs lives.
Also, bold of you to assume you're going to be winning. Does the excitement about this new tech hold up if you consider it from the perspective that it's going to be used against you and your troops?
[0] as opposed to actual defence against invasion - despite the euphemism commonly used by western governments for their military political departments. And what %age of military actions in the last 50 years that your country was involved in count as one, or the other?
You're making so many assumptions that you're attacking a scarecrow. I think that more precision (which may make war "easier") makes up for it in total lives spared. How are militarized robots worse than a JDAM? If I didn't believe that it is more merciful on the whole then I wouldn't take this position.
What I find funny is just like with generative AI, this was under the Google banner first until it got struck with office politics related to Andy Rubin. I still don’t understand why someone else at Google didn’t take it over. They really lost their way a long time ago.
So as robots became more capable and less contained (like current industrial robot arms). What novel tools/techniques there are to stop misbehaving robot?
Will casting a net stop robot like this or do you have to somehow dismember it?
These robots will be available to buy within our lifetime. Look at the nicely designed power button on the back with blue light ring. They are preparing for consumers.
An elderly relative of mine has smoked his whole life. He admits it's bad but won't stop regardless of pressure from family. He enjoys the routine and the quiet moment. He would absolutely send his robot to buy cigarettes if possible. Nobody else in the family wants to buy them.
Recently got a tour through boston dynamics, but mostly saw the spot department, the atlas department was off limits. I guess this was the reason then :) very cool
Good, the hydraulic version sucked ass. Jerky, unpredictable power delivery, when it wasn’t broken. Was such a pain to model and design kinematics around.
No, I wouldn’t. And I appreciate the Boston Dynamics track record. That said, they do have a reputation for viral video releases. Curiously, they usually show some sort of human interaction with their new robots, but maybe too early here? Particularly loved the video of the engineer shoving the robot as it negotiated an obstacle course.
Would you bet money that it isn’t CGI? The fact that we are asking these questions is just as terrifying and impressive as the malicious potential of the robot itself. Wild days we’re living in!
Their marketing style is built around viral Youtube video showing their prototypes being impressive or simply entertaining. Including when the fails.
They got a lot of recognition and attention thanks to this, I would not blame them, I prefer this to sterilized marketing we're seeing most of the time.
I think the parent and gp poster are more like, "Tesla is an odd reference. Not wrong per se, just odd."
It's like saying, "they are building a search engine, just like Netflix!" Sure, Netflix does build search, but like... are they the canonical example for the domain?
They did stress that one advantage of electric motors over hydraulics is better mobility. On the other hand, the motors probably do not yet have the power to make jumps and the like.
I'm not sure that when the robot overlords look through their training data if they will decide that "huytersd" was being serious of facetious. This may not have the effect you were looking for.
This guy seems less creepy than his predecessor. He looks more like a hobby servo-motor robot. I liked the aesthetics of hydraulic Atlas better - somehow fitted well with the character they gave him in all the choreographed demos.
I can't see them really being creepy unless/until we get to "uncanny valley" territory with realistic faces and expressions.
Jesus fuck. I guess the war machine is hungry again so they've fired all the people who made the cute dancing videos and brought in the nightmare engineers.
I'm thinking more and more that that "Terminator" was the most accurate of all the sci-fi dystopias.
the war machine is never not hungry, Boston Dynamics has received some funding from the Department of Defense and has sold robots to various police departments and other government agencies
Really scary feelings watching the clip.
I think we need to make robots either neutral, or somewhat cute. Otherwise society will distrust these entities. This is the opinion of someone strongly rooting for the success of AI/ML and its symbiotic integration with actuators, either on an isolated basis or as a large hive mind.
Does anyone remember the scene in Terminator 2 where the T-1000 turns around instantly by swapping its face from front to back on its head? It reminds me of that. It's like they were consciously trying to evoke the Terminator.
Misplaced empathy. It isn't some disabled people like on a wheelchair, but people suffering from brain damage that makes them terrorize their surroundings. You can hardly find a better solution than to make places unbearable to them by intentionally triggering their hallucinatons.
A hill I'm willing to die on: bipedal robots are an evolutionary path that machines don't need to go down, we have lovely bearings and wheels that work perfectly with electric motors.
Yes obviously there are limitations i.e. stairs and uneven terrain but there are wheeled/tracked solutions for those too
Most of these robots will be used in factories that have very nice flat concrete floors
The ultimate goal is to produce general-purpose robots. If we want robots that can do everything a human can, then legs are definitely useful.
One simple example: getting in and out of a car. Another thing to consider is that a legged robot can tilt itself for balance while carrying heavy objects. To carry a similar weight with a wheeled robot you'll need a much wider wheel base.
And then of course, if you want to build robots that can be useful inside a house, then they need to be able to cope with stairs. There's also construction... At some point, you don't have elevators... Or just circulating between buildings out on the street where the pavement isn't great.
In my opinion your argument assumes there would be a single form factor for robots that will be used everywhere. This assumption has generally been false for most technology, look at the different cars or personal computer. In my opinion, we will have as many kinds of robots as there are breeds of dogs, some of which will be bipedal, but most of them will make do with wheels.
Exactly. We don't need robots that replace humans 1-for-1. If there's a building site that currently needs humans to scale ladders etc then a combination of lifts, loading bays, cranes, drones and tracked robots can do it, not legged robots that carry everything up ladders etc.
Of course that needs very smart systems that can co-ordinate but that's my point, there's an opportunity cost for everything, and I think that's better spent on AI and a multitude of other systems rather than a schoolboy sci-fi fantasy of bipedal robots
> look at the different cars or personal computer.
this feels like a flawed example to me. ~100 years on and all cars are starting to look the same.[1] Personal computers, after like 30 years, have mostly converged around something that's essentially a 3x5 touchscreen with cameras on both sides. Sure, there are laptops and PC's, work and semi trucks, but that's 3 form factors? meh. Manufacturing at scale is much more efficient, and form follows function, can't really escape either.
To me the killer app would be basic house chores: cleaning, doing dishes, etc. For industrial applications I suspect we will retrofit factories for whatever robot tech we have, instead of needing humanoid robots to use interfaces designed for humans. The same goes even for commercial applications like stocking grocery shelves. Driverless cars are an obvious example already. But people probably don’t want to significantly retrofit their homes with less human-friendly interfaces.
Why do I want a general purpose robot? I don't need one robot that does it all, I'm happy with a separate robots for washing my dishes, and vacuuming my floors. Sure both can be improved on, but they don't need to converge. In fact I'm glad those two are separate as I can let both of them run at the same time and get the work done faster, while a general purpose robot can only do one at a time.
The goal is to make my life better, robots are only an implementation detail. Maybe some robots need legs (construction robots?), but most don't. If the robot with wheels is cheaper I'll take that in many cases.
I don't think you want a vacuuming robot. Those already exist, its called a Roomba, and they have a lot of limitations that are completely intractible in their given form factor. You have to modify how you use your house to make it actually useful enough. Some examples:
1. Stairs. Roomba's can't vacuum stairs, so you still need to do those yourself.
2. Stairs, Roomba's can't traverse stairs, so you need one for each floor.
3. Doors. If you want the Roomba to vacuum the whole house, you have to have all the doors open for it.
4. Can't have anything on the floor, the Roomba will either get stuck or avoid it. But I shouldn't have to never leave a backpack on my floor if I want it vacuumed.
5. Corners. Roomba's can't vacuum in corners or in tight areas between furniture and walls. or any other weird geometry. ie: I have a wire shelf. Roomba doesn't fit under it but its easy to use a stick vacuum to get between the wires and to the floor.
And this is before we get to the limit on suction and capacity in that form factor.
The roomba isn't the only possible form of robot vacuum. There may be other options for a design that isn't general purpose but eliminates those issues. Perhaps we should just install elevators or dumb waiters in houses (dumb waiter may be cheaper because it doesn't have to be human rates for safety, while elevators are also useful for humans in wheel chairs which at some point in your life is likely to be someone you are close enough to that you would want to invite them into your house). Likewise doors that can open themself are an option that can solve other problems (think star trek - not current technology)
You want a separate robotic appliance for every thing you want done? That sounds... hectic.
I'm also not sure it's important that laundry and dishes get done at the exact same time - if it is, you should probably do 1 of those tasks yourself - especially since a robot would be able to stuff at night, etc, giving it more time to complete tasks
Also, GP mentions stairs, and adding wheel support to that. So not only do you want a half dozen robits rolling around your home, you'll also need to remodel your home to support it.
Or, of course, we could develop bipedal robots, which seems to have little downside as compared to wheeled robots.
I just want the tasks done without thinking about them. How it happens doesn't matter to me, just get it done. 1 robot, 1 million - I don't care, just so long as I can afford them and they stay out of my way.
While I don't care if everything gets done at once, I care that things are done right and not otherwise inconvenient for me. Maybe the best way to have robots that work slow and then apply a lot of then.
The important thing to note here is robots for many of the things I want do not exist. When they come we will see. Maybe is a a specialized robot, maybe it is more general purpose. That is irrelevant.
My phone is not 100% general purpose, it is a compromise. I'm typing this on a computer not my phone that is right next to my keyboard because my phone is a bad compromise for typing comments. The phone works well enough that I'll use it when on the go, but only because there are times when hauling my full size computer isn't a good option, as soon as I'm using it I prefer the computer.
There is a lot of room for special purpose tools to handle more than one purpose while not being fully general purpose. I'm suggesting we never have a need for full general purpose, but there is for sure room for robots that do more than one thing but don't do everything. I might want the robot that sets and clears my table after meals to also gather my dirty laundry and when clean bring it back - but offload the actual cleaning process for both to specialized robots.
That tilting wheel robot is huge compared to a person, and it seems to me that the potential for it accidentally injuring a person while moving would be much greater than with a humanoid, if only because of its mass and its need to perform large, rapid motions to maintain its balance.
I think we very much do. Robots are currently very expensive, so where do you want to send a robot that you can't use a worker? Probably somewhere at least potentially dangerous.
You want to use the robot to inspect a tunnel in danger of collapse, or a factory that may be leaking a poisonous chemical out of a pipe.
And in such cases you very much want something that can navigate obstacles about as well as a human. You can't count on the area being devoid of rubble, and rebuilding a factory to make it wheeled robot friendly could be an enormously expensive and impractical proposition.
Now humanoids? We already designed everything for us. A good enough humanoid robot can go anywhere a person can, and manipulate anything a human was intended to touch.
I would invest in the spider-legged robot to crawl around spaces.
I think human physiology is amazingly multi-purpose, but we don't need to compromise on balanced skills with robots. Every action can have a physiologically tailored robot to do it. Sure, I can see that I would want my personal butler bot to be humanoid, but I think for the vast majority of cases, humanoid is not the optimal solution.
But I also suppose that if I was going for wooing the general public, I would go humanoid for sure. People compare technology against science fiction, not actual practical considerations.
But a humanoid isn't the optimal form factor to be able to navigate those kinds of terrain. A quadruped robot like Boston Dynamic's Spot is much more stable than a bipedal one, and is already being used for those sorts of applications.
For rougher types of terrain, hexapod robots do great (not the spider-type ones - ones with three legs either side, that fully rotate in the vertical plane), or for that matter just use a tracked tank-type design.
A combination of a tracked vehicles and drones then. There's something quite short-sighted and uncreative about assuming bipedal 1-for-1 replacements are the only solution
Agreed. It seems to go hand-in-hand with people wanting to demonstrate humanoid robots doing domestic chores like shirt folding.
I'd go out on a limb and say that we will NEVER have humanoid robots at home folding laundry, walking upstairs to put it away, or putting away the dishes in the kitchen. This is a 1960's sci-fi vision of the future, similar to that of flying cars. Any robot capable of fully navigating the human world will always be too expensive and unreliable as a home helper.
In a factory a stable wheeled robot is way more practical than a bipedal one. It doesn't need a humanoid head either - but I guess that makes for nice PR photos.
The problem with that “1960s vision” is thinking to literally about having robots do exactly what humans do now. Likely there is a creative way to solve the need for humans to do those tasks via automation, but it’s not likely to look like a humanoid robot folding laundry.
On the other hand, it'd be highly amusing if the future did involve humanoid robots out mowing the grass with a push mower, or getting into their car to drive to the grocery store.
I'm reminded of this Adam Savage video of BD's Spot pulling a rickshaw (23:00).
Humanoid robots making buggy whips to control ornery LLM-based robotic horses. With private/pair key encryption in the whips themselves- they can send a digitally signed wireless "threat" before actual contact is needed.
I don't think its too outlandish to see these getting to a price point where they're cheaper than a human. The goal might not be an appliance Rosie the Robot in every household but having a robot that can help the infirm, elderly or disabled.
If we ever see a world where robots need to be useful outside of a factory with perfectly flat concrete floors, then yes - there needs to be continued evolution in traversal over uneven ground and around unanticipated objects. Bipedal locomotion is useful for this (although not the only solution).
Right now the hardest jobs to replace will be those of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc where they need to operate with fine motor skills in unique and challenging locations - no two ever being the same.
i think search and rescue is a great application of humanoid robotics, you need something very versatile and a human body is not a bad model for a universal terrain form factor.
What about when a robot is carrying an uneven load and has to rebalance?
What if it is knocked over and needs to get back up?
What about Steep inclines? Stairs?
What if it needs to climb on to a different platform? A conveyer belt? A vehicle? A beam?
Even in a factory or warehouse setting wheels are useless for anything but the most ideal cases. And there are already countless robots successfully operating in that space. A general purpose robot is the holy grail, and legs are a requirement for that.
I think it really depends on where the robots will be used. yes short term they will be in factories, shipping centers, etc. Places that can be tailored to the robot.
But the long term prospects of robots would be in your home, maybe going to the store for you, whatever. We see the limitations of wheeled robots with robot vacuums. They do a decent job but are severely limited trying to do its job in a place that was designed for a human. (On the flip side it can also get some places easier than a human would, so it's a bit of a trade off).
By focusing on mimicking humans, we end up being in the best situation for both of these. Factories can try them out with minimal changes to how they operate.
Plus, it seems like the biggest hurdle isn't really walking. It seems like we have gotten that one down fairly well (not perfect obviously) and the bigger issues seem to be hands, object recognition, and just "general" AI. Can it actually do anything with the hardware it has on its own.
Boston Dynamics makes all kinds of robots. None of them are consumer products, so I don't think the very good arguments, like Angela Collier's, against having one in the home will be an impediment to developing very capable humanoid robots.
Seeing how this one moves, it is human-ish, being bipedal, but it isn't mimicking human movement range.
One of my pet peeves is the idea of asking the world to accommodate a situation rather than build solutions that adapt to the world.
Big example: the best we have for mobility nowadays is a wheelchair of some sort. That requires building special ramps and elevators everywhere.
If we had a four legged chair that could climb stairs, etc, like what BD is doing, it could transport people ANYWHERE. you could literally go for a stroll in the woods with it. People that are injured for 6 weeks in their home could go up and down steps, etc. The elderly could go for walks in a park.
So I for one fully support more research into smarter mobility that doesn’t require the world to accommodate it, but instead adjusts to its surroundings.
Segway make wheelchairs that are far more versatile than traditional ones. I'm not sure of the capabilities of their current commercial models, but years ago they had demo videos of them driving up steps and a scissor-like design whereby they could lift the occupant up to reach things.
> One of my pet peeves is the idea of asking the world to accommodate a situation rather than build solutions that adapt to the world.
While I understand and respect the sentiment, in my opinion human history has been a trend in molding our environment to our advantage. I can drive to a remote hill in Bangladesh from the capital because there are roads that we humans built and maintain. If we kept molding to the environment, such an accomplishment would never be possible.
So yeah, maybe mold to the environment a little bit, but also mold the environment a bit, is the ideal solution.
I think this is an absolutely horrible thing for the environment. My point was to make a testament to the human will, and also to counter arguments that try to wield the cost of accessibility against people with disabilities. We could make a global network of ships, planes, and cars, so why is making a tiny ramp such a big deal afterwards?
Not really, not fast nor convenient. Any machine will always add extra volume and weight in the most inconvenient ways. There should really be no limitation on the designs, just optimization under the constraints at hand
it's hard enough for disabled people to get a non-shit wheel chair, you think the world
is going to give them the most advanced quadripedal robotic walking system of all time for nature walks in the woods?
What changed my mind is thinking of humanoid robots as the “last mile” of robotics. All the thousands of use cases where there are no easy patterns and we need something that can fit into any human task without planning or modification.
I'm pretty sure human's role, in the grand scheme of things, is to generate the next step in evolution. We should do the best job we can for the universe.
It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, just to offer a different perspective. But since you ask, how should we employ our capacity to care? On fleeting comfort, or grand visions? Personally, I vote for creating a superior life form, that can carry on the long history of evolution into amazing new realms and abilities. We could be the "bacterial" precursor of an amazing new stage of evolution.
Once they get walking wit legs perfected, they can install wheels on those or do whatever wheel thing they want. That will probably be an easier addon.
I too think it's a distraction too but it's won't be the limiting factor. Planes don't flap their wings, cars don't have legs yet are faster and more powerfull than animals.
The important part lagging is the brain. Understanding the world, reacting to it learning. Even an ant can navigate the world pick-up objects and do tasks.
Well yes. There's always a robot that can be specifically made to handle a specific task in the most efficient way possible.
But the fact is, the world has mostly been built by humans for humans. Pretty much any task you can think of can be accomplished by a human with their arms, legs and some tools.
Androids are human-compatible. An android could go any place a human could go and operate any machinery a human could operate - that widens the space of possible applications. A wheeled robot is capable of many tasks, but it can't dance with you, play piano, wear your wardrobe or sit in a plane seat.
I think you're unnecessarily short-circuiting your imagination.
For one, there are many applications in dangerous environments that could benefit from the dexterity and ability of bipeds - rescue missions, mining, space walks, etc.
If we’re using NN’s to get fine motor skills right, like final steps in an assembly line, the simplest and most abundant source of training data are humans. :shrug:
Sure, but you don't even need a lower body for that, and if you do want to let the robot move around than a stable wheeled base that doesn't negatively impact the fine-motor skills needed when it is in position seems preferable.
Boston Dynamics: Hey everyone, we're really excited to show you the great progress we are making in our attempts to re-create the Torment Nexus, from the classic cautionary sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Too many responses: Oh, wow, it's so creepy, just like the book! Lol. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it won't turn out as bad as DCTTN. ;-) Best just get on with my day and mostly forget about it then...
Using my human brain, I can't tell if this is real or not. One day the robots are going to watch this video and decide they've had enough, and that's how we all end, joke video or not. I really do hope it's a joke, but there's not enough money in the world for me to start smacking around a robot holding a live firearm.
Farewell to HD Atlas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EM5_VFlt8
Boston Dynamics retires its legendary humanoid robot https://spectrum.ieee.org/boston-dynamics-atlas-retires
All New Atlas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.
There have been some efforts for vendor-agnostic robot software like RoboDK and other warehouse execution systems, but the default is proprietary vendor software.
It would be nice for society if this were true, but we'd need someone to exist whose complementary technology was robotics who found it worth commoditizing the entire ecosystem against their will. Or regulators who weren't entirely beholden to industry lobbyists.
Fanuc robots are straight forward to service, they make the parts very available to do it yourself if you want. We order them here and there no problem.
But they are beasts and it can take an entire day just to replace a part. Then you have to reassemble it in the right order. None of it is made difficult on purpose. It has tight tolerances, and fancy shit like harmonic drives for zero backlash and more.
It's going to be kneecapped far worse than phones or tractors. A general purpose humanoid robot is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple gps farming tractor or a cheap android phone.
Companies will absolutely NOT want to give up that moat after developing such tech for 10-20 years.
Right now no regular user has the technical ability to fiddle with a phone's laminated screen glued to a touch matrix paired with a fingerprint sensor and a camera, so we're alreay past the complexity threshold.
But we could still reuse a screen block from phone A on phone B, except that's been forbidden by technical measures specially added to prevent it.
The same way we could probably replace a whole leg with another from a robot from the same series, except it will be DRMed to death.
We'll have to eternally push for regulation I think, companies will always try their best to fuck with repairability.
Mobiles are similar, they are filled to the brim with various electronics, connected together into a huge mash. why would you even expect to fix that?
Aftermarket ECUs (even the open source ones like rusEFI and speeduino) show that you can actually do the stuff required to make modern engines go vroom, but manufacturers have no desire to make that process easy out of the box.
I could not possibly agree less. You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?
> It's more likely to be it costs way more to make as nice a device that people want, that's also repairable.
Based on what evidence? Current practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take. These things aren't free to implement– there's a calculable ROI that they feel is worth spending millions of engineering and lobbying dollars to implement.
> How many people would pay that premium when they're never going to service it anyway?
Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell. If corporations screwed up the market bad enough to undervalue their products because they're mislabeled disposables, well then that's on them. If they can't make it work, I guarantee someone else will. Will there be downsides? There's downsides to everything. So far "stuff theoretically might be more expensive up-front even though this limits their ability to artificially extract money from customers later on without disclosing it" isn't quite a showstopper.
No, and this is a bit of a giveaway that you're not thinking clearly. Just goodies vs baddies nonsense.
> rrent practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take
I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good. The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.
Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.
> Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell
You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive. This is why Framework laptops aren't as appealing as other laptops if you factor out repairability.
Mhmm.
> I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good.
No, the topic is about RTR in the context of robots and the comment I replied to was discussing phones, robots and tractors.
> The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.
Were they better specifically because the battery wasn't replaceable without a can opener? Of course not. And some people even still used the can openers. You're not giving a reason, or an excuse... you're giving a justification which doesn't even address the actual point.
> Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.
Thanks for bringing up printers. The price for consumer-level printers is far less than they actually cost because they know they'll be able to extract insane profits after the fact from ink sales. Printer ink, as it's priced by these companies, costs about $1,664 – $9,600 per gallon-- more expensive than fresh whole human blood-- and they do everything in their power to force consumers to only buy it from them. They deliberately make the printers shitty and impossible to repair so they can continue to entice customers with the bargain priced newer models with all sorts of fancy marketing bullshit so they can sell them progressively smaller amounts of the same ink in locked-down ink cartridges for even more money.
> You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive.
BS. They don't set the price based on their costs, they set the price based on what the market will allow, and this allows them to both manipulate the market by making it seem like their products are cheaper than they are, and extract yet more money out of consumers who have little choice because the majority of consumer goods are made by a handful of vertically integrated companies. Let's take a look at the top lobbiers against RTR legislation and their net worth:
Sorry. Less regulation is exactly what created this bullshit situation where huge corporations feel entitled to extract limitless amounts of cash out of consumers that have little if any choice, and the problem is getting worse. If you think this is merely a matter of companies trying to provide the most competitively priced products and not a deliberate attempt to price gouge, you are beyond naive. Anti-consumer practices aren't a neutral facet of corporate behavior, and the organizations that profit most from it are not merely staying afloat... they're unfathomably rich and getting richer, faster, every day.That's the wrong way to say "recouping the cost of a large up-front R&D investment".
The second someone releases a general purpose humanoid robot that is capable of self replication but is locked out from doing so with DRM the race will be on to break that DRM.
The self replicating humanoid robot will be a supreme game changer. It's a genie in the bottle that lets you wish for more wishes.
Maybe just armor piercing rounds fired in the right spot? A net? A special taser? A paintball to it's main cameras? Cover it in some gluey substance?
https://youtu.be/I5MQNf1oeyQ?si=CR3X0C76qFgEoLza
https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Downloads/Publ...
> Under the law, companies that make cellphones and other consumer electronics are required to provide the tools and know-how to repair those devices.
1. Do you think the Oregon law fell short by not requiring industrial electronics to be repairable as well? 2. Will the proliferation of tools and know-how for repair be sufficient to meaningfully extend the life of most electronics? 3. Is legal mandate sufficient or necessary to motivate companies to open their chests to the public? Or is a voluntary movement possible that still rewards the stakeholders?
My hope is that projects like Atlas will be sustainable and prices eventually come down to commodity levels - say the price scale of cars. If people are empowered with tools to develop on these machines in a safe way, I think we could see a revolution similar to the cell phone or PC. My fear is that these machines will become just an extra inefficient automation step in an overpriced supply chain one-off application.
Humanoid robots have many, many challenges to deployment. Especially, creating a machine that people can safely operate near is extremely challenging. The amount of intelligence person uses to not bump another person is very under rated.
Worth calling out that Hyundai is a major investor in Boston Dynamics.
FTA: This journey will start with Hyundai—in addition to investing in us, the Hyundai team is building the next generation of automotive manufacturing capabilities, and it will serve as a perfect testing ground for new Atlas applications.
I believe robots are currently making car parts in abundance. The robots usually are like a box with a hydraulic arm or something equivalent.
The specially and especially hard part of humanoid robots is justifying the cost and complexity of the construction by having them by "walk-on replacements" for humans and so they have failed entirely at being that.
What can humanoid robots making car parts do, that the already-existing and already widely deployed robots making car parts can't?
I don’t literally mean retool a conventional production line in one night
* which definitely requires human level general AI at fairly low electrical power demand
Why would the super villains operating these armies of human-capable robots bother paying into an upside down pension system?
At the very least they can defend themselves from the torch wield masses with even more robots.
Because the governments will, in order of effort needed for compliance, fine them, eminent domain their robots, arrest them, shoot them for resisting arrest, or fire a cruise missile into their secret volcano lair.
Also because if you have a self replicating robot army, you can give every man, woman, and child their own personal O'Neill cylinder and still have 99% of Venus left over, let alone the remainder of the solar system's resources.
I had to stop myself from laughing when I heard an old lady in a restaurant complain about not getting enough money from her pension. Sure, I wish she had more money too but at this rate I'll be retiring 15 years older than she was when she retired.
If we've gone so far that governments cannot stand up against private robot armies then that's not an option anymore, but the point is not to get there.
In my opinion, repair and maintenance is the most commonly overlooked aspect of an automated system deployment. Scaling is impossible without efficient tools to fix problems when they occur, especially if the number of authorized service people is limited.
The more serviceability can be automated and standardized, the greater the number of areas that will benefit from widespread robotics.
But I would have thought they’d rather not have us experience atlas as some kind of freakish terminator mixed with the girl from the ring.
But the animal part of our brain that screams danger when we see this is just a byproduct of that. Anybody giving it real credence rather than just laughing it off should stop driving a car, travelling by air, talking to people on a phone, etc.
It looks amazing in the video.. But of course Boston Dynamics chose the most disturbing way of demonstrating its movement capabilities, as usual.
I swear they do it on purpose at this point. Good lord! Put some googly eyes on these things at least.
https://budget-cuts.fandom.com/wiki/Supervisor
https://www.avforums.com/reviews/lost-in-space-season-1-tv-s...
However if you look closely the robot does have scuffs and scratches on it so I think it's real.
On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful.
1- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...
This "robots + AI" space is heating up just as fast as LLMs, and every country seems to have a dozen startups in the ring.
Here is just a sample:
https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo
https://rainbow-robotics.com/en_main?_l=en
https://sanctuary.ai/
https://www.tesla.com/AI
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CToL2qkCd8g (funny)
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1b10p2i/chines...
https://www.engadget.com/menteebot-is-a-human-sized-ai-robot...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/15jyw... (NSFW)
...
Everyone is working on this.
https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-...
Edit: Haha, case in point. I opened Twitter and sure enough there's a new announcement of a humanoid robot today, from Intel/Mobileye: https://twitter.com/AmnonShashua/status/1780611499133685889
You doubtlessly know more about life in South Korea than I do, but i found this video [0] and its sequel [1] very enlightening.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74&t=1050s 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A&t=589s
Murdoch family for example has huge influence in US, UK and Australia.
All school choice does is give poor parents the same kind of school choice that rich parents have.
If you're rich and the schools around you suck, you just move to a neighborhood with good schools! That means you pay taxes in that school district, which fund your kids schools.
If you're poor and the schools around you suck, you have no choices. You send your kids to the sucky school.
School choice would mean allowing the same choice for poor folks. They would be able to choose where their kids go to school, and their tax money (in the form of a voucher) would follow them to that school.
How could such a scheme "retard public education efforts"? The point of public education is not to prop up failing state-run schools, the point is educating the public. Undermining shitty schools is a feature, not a bug.
I wonder if there is research on the topic - I mean Adam Smith is translated to all languages so it’s not about the ideas or non-tacit knowledge. Must be something institutional or otherwise cultural.
A lot of people just seemed content and satisfied with their lot in life, without much ambition or drive to improve their position. Is that a good or bad thing? I honestly don’t know. In this point in my life, I don’t particularly like it. I love visiting Europe but would not want to live (and work) there. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m older and or retired.
Versus the US and Asia where many people are trying to claw their way to the top. Obviously most will not get to the top, but many do end up improving their socioeconomic status to varying degrees.
Then again, it's hard to deny the progress and products these countries have made. So what gives? To be honest, I don't know.
There's a flip side to South Korea's chaebol-centric economy, however. South Korea's national security situation is extremely dangerous, so in fact one of the reasons for the industrial policy has been to maintain a domestic defense industrial base so that they aren't dependent on arms imports from Western countries. Accordingly, most of the South Korean chaebols have a significant presence in the arms industry. In recent years, this sector has expanded, with South Korea becoming one of the world's leading arms exporters.
Here is the definition I'm working from: "private ownership of capital and means of production meets market competition, driving resource efficiency, innovation, and maximizing profit while respond to consumer demand resulting in GDP growth."
If you take that definition then look at the last 100 years, only 4 names come up:
Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. No countries in the world in the last 100 years have applied capitalism, then grown, the way those countries have.
I'd be curious how you define capitalism, and then the countries you think have applied it better than the ones I've mentioned in my posts on this subject.
These graphs don't go back 100 years, but they do show fairly similar growth.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=canada%20gdp%20per%20ca...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk%20gdp%20per%20capita...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=germany%20gdp%20per%20c...
Compared with Japan:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan%20gdp%20per%20cap...
Only South Korea is the stand-out here:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=south%20korea%20gdp%20p...
China is not far behind, despite an authoritarian govt.
KR & JP, as well as CH, clearly learned well from Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge
1: http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09ekK2QgflM
Maybe we need life-size robot battles? Would love to see son-of-Atlas suplexing TeslaBot like that mini white one does!
You apparently disagree? Was there something in the video you think marks it out as CGI? Or do we just have differing gut instincts about it?
I’m the exact opposite. My gut says it’s rendered. The graininess, the odd chromatic aberrations, the shadows that are too clean, the “head” being way too physically clean (like if the modellers got sloppy with the thousands of pieces), something odd about the fps of the robot vs the fos of the background, and there’s something odd about the physics of how it gets up (yes, beyond it’s horror-movie sequence)
It is a bit funny though, the company renowned for walking robots posts a video of a robot walking and many people just can't believe it.
To me it was way more surprising that they got walking (and more) working with hydraulics, a much more unwieldy and heavy technology than servos and batteries. This is obviously more refined but perhaps to me, a little less surprising and so definitely believable.
Even more odd to get a response like this that has certainty without any facts or debate.
This is going to haunt my dreams.
I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.
"The hydraulic legged robots from Boston Dynamics, starting with Big Dog, have set the standard for the performance capabilities of modern legged robots. Hydraulic actuators tend to have high force density and high robustness to impacts, as impact loads are distributed over the large surface area of the hydraulic channels, rather than, for example several small gear teeth. Another compelling reason to use hydraulics, especially for high degree-of-freedom machines, is the relative ease of adding high-force degrees of freedom. For an electric motor driven robots, each actuator needs to be sized for its peak performance, which makes building systems with many degrees of freedom needing high peak power and force at all the joints (and especially at distal joints) very challenging. With a hydraulic system, it is easier to build high-force distal links (ankles, wrists, fingers, etc) without adding significant mass and inertia to the limbs."
[1] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/118671/105734...
This makes sense for quasi-static systems but obviously is a limiting factor for dynamic robots.
BACKFLIPS.
When do we want them?
[backflips]
For example, Amazon uses hundreds of thousands of simple wheeled floor-jack like robots to move the shelves around [1], and they started doing this many years ago.
Meanwhile, they have only a handful of humanoid robots, on experimental basis, trying to decide if they are useful [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULswQgd73Tc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8IdbodRG14
"Flat"... with a bunch of cracks, joints, pallet chips, and other debris
https://spectrum.ieee.org/atlas-humanoid-robot-ceo-interview
It clearly has a much larger range of motion and if it is also stronger as claimed then I can't wait for the acrobatics videos that are surely coming.
But I think the most exciting thing is that it has hands from the start. Atlas didn't have hands for most of its existence and so couldn't do much in the way of useful tasks. I think controlling hands is actually much harder than walking or doing backflips. Hopefully Boston Dynamics will be able to make this version useful.
Or just use wheels / a wheel. This whole humanoid thing strikes me as an addiction to old sci Fi stories.
Hydraulic systems have very little "give", unless you put a hydraulic accumulator (an air tank with a fluid/air barrier) in the system. Electric motors have plenty of "give". Forcing a motor to turn backwards won't hurt it. The gear train is usually the weak point. As motors and controllers have improved, robot gear reduction ratios have decreased, which reduces the load on the gear train and lets the motor absorb shock loads. Direct drive robots eliminate the gear train entirely. Here's a nice one.[1] "You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - General Electric electric locomotive rep, around 1900.
With modern motors, you can get huge torque with light weight, and cooling becomes the limitation. Schaft used water-cooled motors in their direct-drive robot. Google bought Schaft, ran them into the ground and killed them.
[1] https://shop.directdrive.com/products/diablo-world-s-first-d...
I'm still mostly convinced that harvesting the energy and re-using it ala elastic tendons is a decently good idea. But probably far too complex.
Variable compliance muscles are desirable, but hard to do. A pneumatic cylinder with adjustable pressure on both sides will do it, and Festo builds a lot of that for industrial automation. Two opposed springs pulled on by two positional actuators will do it, but that's kind of bulky. There's a hack called a "series elastic actuator", which is a rigid positional actuator with a stiff spring on the end. When it gets some pushback, the spring compresses, and the motor frantically tries to move the positional actuator before the spring bottoms out. This allows you to simulate a spring with off the shelf screw jacks.
Those new direct-drive motors are a good solution. Direct-drive pancake motors have been around for a while, but they used to be about a foot across. Now they're smaller. Probably a spinoff of drone motor technology.
One of the cheapest low-gear-ratios I found was the RMD series: (which is 1:6 or 1:10 gear ratio).
https://ozrobotics.com/shop/myactuator-rmd-x4-16-micro-motor...
This is one of those 80/20 things that is just glaringly obvious. Like lvl 5 autonomous cars vs lvl 3-4.
If the gear ratio on these motors is high, then there can only be faked compliance in the tuned force-torque controllers you mentioned. MIT's little cheetah robot, on the other hand, deliberately used low-gear ratios to keep things naturally squishy if needed. This is the way to go; putting elastic tendons or spring elements seems like a good idea but then you can't actually model the non-linearity well (the 1st order motor becomes a 2nd or higher order system).
I don't have any particular problem with that, but its a little weird? I figured they were a more traditional industrial robotics company that just did the humanoid robots as a side line for publicity, but googling, I guess that's not the case.
The whole point of the article is speculating that they are specifically retiring their hydraulic robot because it was never going to be commercially viable. Which makes it look like they are finally ready to pivot from pure R&D to commercial production. Thus they want fully electronic robots instead of hydraulics that are messy and require more (almost constant?) maintenance.
I'm not an engineering guy but I assume the hydraulics were more useful for pushing the boundaries of possible motion with such a heavy, robust, and versatile design. Now that the AI systems controlling vision, motion, proprioception/spatial awareness, etc are more fully developed, they can create more specialized and scaled down versions of the robot for specific applications that are lighter and don't require hydraulics to perform their tasks reliably? Just guessing here, am happy to be corrected or given more a nuanced take.
it's quite literally succeeding at it in front of our faces.
this is why their core product is video demos laced with cynical terror disguised as humorous pop culture references.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge
I remember seeing prototypes from Toshiba when I was 10 (20 years ago), and every few months, there is a company releasing an "amazing video." its mother company then spins it off like there's no adequate progress, and so on.
In it she covers the latest and greatest robot news, with occasional commentary/perspectives.
However to more directly answer your question, you need to know/talk to someone in the industry at the moment. I am not aware of a single “spot” that gives an honest in depth appraisal of where we are.
From my experience there is a ton of new “hardware” coming out, not just in the humanoid space (Agility Robotics being imho the most “real”), but also in lower cost robot arms, end effectors, sensors, and compute.
Where things are harder to track is where we really are in the software realm. If you look at software driving this hardware, most of it is early stages. Perhaps TRL level 3 to 5 at best. The higher TRL is non-intelligent control software (that is based on decades of work). The newer, AI/Machine Learning/“Smart” software tends to only have limited roll out. At best it will be a startup at the relatively early stages, but more often then not it is still a researcher sitting at a University or a large corporations research lab. In either of those cases, you will see single to at most double digit examples of those systems actually doing work.
However, to your point, it is super easy to create a single (or even a series) of cool videos… it just takes one success in 100s of takes. It is harder to make something that will perform day in and day out and really change the industry/world.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VnbBCm_ZyQ
In general robotics flies under the radar because it's rare to see a unicorn or anything really flashy and there is a big gap between big aspirations and fake demos and real world applications with polished use cases and diligent design, processes, etc.
source: I'm a skeptic roboticist working in the industry.
What I can say it's there has been always a movement to weaponize robotics in some way and this has gained interest from the market in the past few years specially with the Ukrainian and Palestinian wars. It takes time and a lot of money to polish an application like this, if there isn't a behemoth funding research and PD on this it will take a long time before it takes off, and I hope it never does.
Like with every other market check if the product is available for sale and at what price point. And then look up what failure points people actually using the system are complaining about. (Because every system has problems and weaknesses. If you don't see reports about any then the system hasn't left the lab where the PR of it is controlled.)
worked examples: washing machine (that's a robot alright, has a computer, actuators, sensors). Readily available commercially for 200-500 GBP. Usually works reliably, occasional reports of flooding the room.
robotic vacuum: Readily available commercially for 300-1k GBP. Works okay, reports about it spreading pet's poop around rooms.
spot from Boston Dynamics. Not as readily available as the above, but can be purchased. Reported price 74,500 USD[1] Seems to trip over its own legs sometimes in a hard to explain way: [2][3] (not to count as a dig against spot, seeing these issues is actually a great thing. It means third party people in the real world use it.)
atlas from Boston Dynamics. You can't buy it. No price advertised. You can't see third party reports of it malfunctioning. Not because it is perfect, but because nobody has access to it.
1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-dog-now... 2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8bTo9Q3FWzE 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJHAJm3uMEI
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/video-friday
With FSD 12.3.3 released, it's clear FSD is getting smarter and smarter. How many of those releases left until people trust Optimus to fold their laundry? 1.0 Optimius will still be pretty dumb, but could still be worth the price (especially with continuous software upgrades!)
Such WBC then makes sure that the robot reaches both it's task goals (eg. grab something, with 1, 2 arms), as well as it's (dynamic) stability goals so it doesn't fall over. They are also capable of choreographing the robot pretty accurately as we say in earlier videos. But what is most very impressive to me is the robot using the mass and momentum of things it grabs to keep stable or move itself. In one of the videos it grabs a big piece of wood and uses it to turn itself around while jumping. Amazing! Controlling that in terms of dynamics is... wow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EM5_VFlt8
Looking forward to see some more robot parkour/dance
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EM5_VFlt8
I wasn't expecting to see a robot bleed, several times.
Boston Dynamics Retires Its Legendary Humanoid Robot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063766
Spoiler alert: dis-arm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsulVXpgYg
"Understood, now de-livering John."
But it was always going to be Skynet.
I bet the next version will have teeth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
If a robot were to reach an AED without frying it with magnets, it would need to be tall enough and have fingers.
I agree with you that there are more efficient shapes out there (like the robot from interstellar) but a humanoid at slightly shorter than the average adult (for fear related reasons) shape is the best general purpose shape because it is so backward compatible in all sorts of not yet imagined emergency scenarios.
Mostly wheels just seem like a better idea. For rough terrain, why not just fly ?
Weight
(You need way more energy to do anything)
different configuration, but electric motors are fine if you get momentum on your side. Humans use their entire range of motion get build up velocity to jump; this is motion control thing.
Wonder if that includes weapon systems?
https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp
> With its cutting-edge unmanned and automated weapons systems, Hyundai WIA upgraded the level of defense industry system.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/06/boston-dynamics-pledges-wea...
Ed: apparently the pledge came after Hyundai took control?
https://bostondynamics.com/news/hyundai-motor-group-complete...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFRcle4Szo4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Y52zjZYXo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9pZQ29RSz4I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XPOpnJSldUg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p535RRR5MqM
[1]:https://youtu.be/aajbFO7xwBM?t=36
An oldie but a goodie, heres one of my favorite displays of how "ahead of the curve" Tesla is:
https://youtu.be/ib1KKHGYmLQ?t=1689
This one is actually pretty interesting cause handling big breakers is quite hazardous.
https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/boston-dynamics-robot-d...
so they do have non-military applications.
Is feels like they almost designed this video with that eventuality in mind. Like that wanted a second wave of organic 3rd party viral advertising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4jKSdfRtxk
Of course this is not directly comparable, but I think robotics is harder and more less open to brute force approaches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJTf4JhGSsI
Their hardware is second to none.
FML, that's dark.
Also, bold of you to assume you're going to be winning. Does the excitement about this new tech hold up if you consider it from the perspective that it's going to be used against you and your troops?
[0] as opposed to actual defence against invasion - despite the euphemism commonly used by western governments for their military political departments. And what %age of military actions in the last 50 years that your country was involved in count as one, or the other?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-project-ma...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw
There's also too much ambient occlusion in the rendering, but they were careful with the materials and the scene that it looks somewhat plausible.
Compare it with an actual video of their real robot: https://youtu.be/48qL8Jt39Vs?si=Kkb7oTnYf-GllRJv
The difference in the movements is clearly visible.
Will casting a net stop robot like this or do you have to somehow dismember it?
Geoffrey Hinton suggested that by 2030 the US military wants 50% robot
"Sorry we can't sell cigarettes to anyone born after 2009, or robots".
An elderly relative of mine has smoked his whole life. He admits it's bad but won't stop regardless of pressure from family. He enjoys the routine and the quiet moment. He would absolutely send his robot to buy cigarettes if possible. Nobody else in the family wants to buy them.
Boston Dynamics Retires Its Legendary Humanoid Robot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063766
a logic of Atlases?
Boston Dynamics is not run by bozos, they have a pretty consistent track record of showing the real stuff.
Would you bet money that it isn’t CGI? The fact that we are asking these questions is just as terrifying and impressive as the malicious potential of the robot itself. Wild days we’re living in!
I would bet.
Their marketing style is built around viral Youtube video showing their prototypes being impressive or simply entertaining. Including when the fails.
They got a lot of recognition and attention thanks to this, I would not blame them, I prefer this to sterilized marketing we're seeing most of the time.
For sure they have been working on this for a long time.
I predict that they will also move toward neural nets for all the vision, control and understanding of the world (like Tesla)
You sound confused.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FSD is based on neural net so is Optimus vision
Do you think Tesla invented neural nets or something?
It's like saying, "they are building a search engine, just like Netflix!" Sure, Netflix does build search, but like... are they the canonical example for the domain?
I can't see them really being creepy unless/until we get to "uncanny valley" territory with realistic faces and expressions.
> Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban UBI Experiments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39549098
You could offload the heavy processing to a larger computer in the back seat. Then even the robots get to suffer with backseat drivers :)
I bet it talks
The city I once knew as home is teetering on the edge of radioactive oblivion
A three-hundred thousand degree baptism by nuclear fire
I'm not sorry, we had it coming
A surge of white-hot atonement will be our wake-up call
Hope for our future is now a stillborn dream
The bombs begin to fall and I'm rushing to meet my love
Please, remember me
There is no more
I'm thinking more and more that that "Terminator" was the most accurate of all the sci-fi dystopias.
Progress in robotics is beginning to look non-linear and it will have only positive impact on the world.
Skynet won’t be humanoid terminators. Or even drones. The real threat of AI is if/when it will be applied to the field of virology.
Progress in robotics is beginning to look non-linear and it will have only positive impact on the world.
Skynet won’t be humanoid terminators. Or even drones. The real threat of AI is if/when it will be applied to the field of virology.
There are a sizable percentage of people out there that would love to use this for subjugation and control. Will we let them win?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pq9F5f8kyE&t=119s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hSZkU9Yyp0w
Shock value PR stunt? Moving the Overton window for the general public’s aversion to what comes next?
Yes obviously there are limitations i.e. stairs and uneven terrain but there are wheeled/tracked solutions for those too
Most of these robots will be used in factories that have very nice flat concrete floors
One simple example: getting in and out of a car. Another thing to consider is that a legged robot can tilt itself for balance while carrying heavy objects. To carry a similar weight with a wheeled robot you'll need a much wider wheel base.
And then of course, if you want to build robots that can be useful inside a house, then they need to be able to cope with stairs. There's also construction... At some point, you don't have elevators... Or just circulating between buildings out on the street where the pavement isn't great.
Of course that needs very smart systems that can co-ordinate but that's my point, there's an opportunity cost for everything, and I think that's better spent on AI and a multitude of other systems rather than a schoolboy sci-fi fantasy of bipedal robots
this feels like a flawed example to me. ~100 years on and all cars are starting to look the same.[1] Personal computers, after like 30 years, have mostly converged around something that's essentially a 3x5 touchscreen with cameras on both sides. Sure, there are laptops and PC's, work and semi trucks, but that's 3 form factors? meh. Manufacturing at scale is much more efficient, and form follows function, can't really escape either.
[1]https://windingroad.com/articles/features/why-do-all-new-car...
1. Stairs. Roomba's can't vacuum stairs, so you still need to do those yourself.
2. Stairs, Roomba's can't traverse stairs, so you need one for each floor.
3. Doors. If you want the Roomba to vacuum the whole house, you have to have all the doors open for it.
4. Can't have anything on the floor, the Roomba will either get stuck or avoid it. But I shouldn't have to never leave a backpack on my floor if I want it vacuumed.
5. Corners. Roomba's can't vacuum in corners or in tight areas between furniture and walls. or any other weird geometry. ie: I have a wire shelf. Roomba doesn't fit under it but its easy to use a stick vacuum to get between the wires and to the floor.
And this is before we get to the limit on suction and capacity in that form factor.
I'm also not sure it's important that laundry and dishes get done at the exact same time - if it is, you should probably do 1 of those tasks yourself - especially since a robot would be able to stuff at night, etc, giving it more time to complete tasks
Also, GP mentions stairs, and adding wheel support to that. So not only do you want a half dozen robits rolling around your home, you'll also need to remodel your home to support it.
Or, of course, we could develop bipedal robots, which seems to have little downside as compared to wheeled robots.
While I don't care if everything gets done at once, I care that things are done right and not otherwise inconvenient for me. Maybe the best way to have robots that work slow and then apply a lot of then.
The important thing to note here is robots for many of the things I want do not exist. When they come we will see. Maybe is a a specialized robot, maybe it is more general purpose. That is irrelevant.
Why do you want a smart phone, instead of the telephone, contact book, camera, clock, alarm clock, radio, mail, credit card and so on?
There is a lot of room for special purpose tools to handle more than one purpose while not being fully general purpose. I'm suggesting we never have a need for full general purpose, but there is for sure room for robots that do more than one thing but don't do everything. I might want the robot that sets and clears my table after meals to also gather my dirty laundry and when clean bring it back - but offload the actual cleaning process for both to specialized robots.
Have you not seen Boston Dynamics tilting wheeled robots that work very well? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns
You want to use the robot to inspect a tunnel in danger of collapse, or a factory that may be leaking a poisonous chemical out of a pipe.
And in such cases you very much want something that can navigate obstacles about as well as a human. You can't count on the area being devoid of rubble, and rebuilding a factory to make it wheeled robot friendly could be an enormously expensive and impractical proposition.
Now humanoids? We already designed everything for us. A good enough humanoid robot can go anywhere a person can, and manipulate anything a human was intended to touch.
I think human physiology is amazingly multi-purpose, but we don't need to compromise on balanced skills with robots. Every action can have a physiologically tailored robot to do it. Sure, I can see that I would want my personal butler bot to be humanoid, but I think for the vast majority of cases, humanoid is not the optimal solution.
But I also suppose that if I was going for wooing the general public, I would go humanoid for sure. People compare technology against science fiction, not actual practical considerations.
For rougher types of terrain, hexapod robots do great (not the spider-type ones - ones with three legs either side, that fully rotate in the vertical plane), or for that matter just use a tracked tank-type design.
I'd go out on a limb and say that we will NEVER have humanoid robots at home folding laundry, walking upstairs to put it away, or putting away the dishes in the kitchen. This is a 1960's sci-fi vision of the future, similar to that of flying cars. Any robot capable of fully navigating the human world will always be too expensive and unreliable as a home helper.
In a factory a stable wheeled robot is way more practical than a bipedal one. It doesn't need a humanoid head either - but I guess that makes for nice PR photos.
On the other hand, it'd be highly amusing if the future did involve humanoid robots out mowing the grass with a push mower, or getting into their car to drive to the grocery store.
I'm reminded of this Adam Savage video of BD's Spot pulling a rickshaw (23:00).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyaocKS3sfg
Maybe in the future the passenger will be a humanoid robot being taken to its laundry folding job?
Right now the hardest jobs to replace will be those of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc where they need to operate with fine motor skills in unique and challenging locations - no two ever being the same.
What if it is knocked over and needs to get back up?
What about Steep inclines? Stairs?
What if it needs to climb on to a different platform? A conveyer belt? A vehicle? A beam?
Even in a factory or warehouse setting wheels are useless for anything but the most ideal cases. And there are already countless robots successfully operating in that space. A general purpose robot is the holy grail, and legs are a requirement for that.
But the long term prospects of robots would be in your home, maybe going to the store for you, whatever. We see the limitations of wheeled robots with robot vacuums. They do a decent job but are severely limited trying to do its job in a place that was designed for a human. (On the flip side it can also get some places easier than a human would, so it's a bit of a trade off).
By focusing on mimicking humans, we end up being in the best situation for both of these. Factories can try them out with minimal changes to how they operate.
Plus, it seems like the biggest hurdle isn't really walking. It seems like we have gotten that one down fairly well (not perfect obviously) and the bigger issues seem to be hands, object recognition, and just "general" AI. Can it actually do anything with the hardware it has on its own.
Seeing how this one moves, it is human-ish, being bipedal, but it isn't mimicking human movement range.
I’m gonna pass.
One of my pet peeves is the idea of asking the world to accommodate a situation rather than build solutions that adapt to the world.
Big example: the best we have for mobility nowadays is a wheelchair of some sort. That requires building special ramps and elevators everywhere.
If we had a four legged chair that could climb stairs, etc, like what BD is doing, it could transport people ANYWHERE. you could literally go for a stroll in the woods with it. People that are injured for 6 weeks in their home could go up and down steps, etc. The elderly could go for walks in a park.
So I for one fully support more research into smarter mobility that doesn’t require the world to accommodate it, but instead adjusts to its surroundings.
While I understand and respect the sentiment, in my opinion human history has been a trend in molding our environment to our advantage. I can drive to a remote hill in Bangladesh from the capital because there are roads that we humans built and maintain. If we kept molding to the environment, such an accomplishment would never be possible.
So yeah, maybe mold to the environment a little bit, but also mold the environment a bit, is the ideal solution.
You say this like it's a good thing.
Not really, not fast nor convenient. Any machine will always add extra volume and weight in the most inconvenient ways. There should really be no limitation on the designs, just optimization under the constraints at hand
I was replying to parent’s sentiment of why build this kind of thing in the first place.
I was providing an example of a benefit of this technology.
What changed my mind is thinking of humanoid robots as the “last mile” of robotics. All the thousands of use cases where there are no easy patterns and we need something that can fit into any human task without planning or modification.
The important part lagging is the brain. Understanding the world, reacting to it learning. Even an ant can navigate the world pick-up objects and do tasks.
But the fact is, the world has mostly been built by humans for humans. Pretty much any task you can think of can be accomplished by a human with their arms, legs and some tools.
A generalised robot would look like a human.
For one, there are many applications in dangerous environments that could benefit from the dexterity and ability of bipeds - rescue missions, mining, space walks, etc.
Are you sure? We had robots in factories for more than 50 years, and they don't usually move.
Too many responses: Oh, wow, it's so creepy, just like the book! Lol. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it won't turn out as bad as DCTTN. ;-) Best just get on with my day and mostly forget about it then...
(With apologies to Alex Blechman)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE