
Alphabet Shakes Up Its Robotics Division - cryptoz
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/technology/alphabet-shakes-up-its-robotics-division.html?smid=tw-nytimestech&smtyp=cur
======
11thEarlOfMar
Perhaps we are just impatient.

Karl Benz invented the 'first automobile' in 1885 [0]. 29 years later, in
1914, Ford built the first mass-production factory for his autos. It initially
produced 4 cars/hour, an annual rate of about 15,000. In 1915, there were
8,000 cars in all of the US. [1]

I cannot find data, but let's guess that it's 10 more years before 1% of
households in the US have cars. That would have meant about 500,000 cars.

1885 - 1925 is 40 years between invention of the first gas powered auto and 1%
market penetration (bearing my assumption). Where was the robotics industry in
1976, 40 years ago?

Moreover, the automobile solved one problem: Moving a human from point A to
point B on a paved road. Many efforts are approaching robots as consumer
products by trying to solve many very hard problems all at the same time.
Perhaps robotic vacuums are the (only?) successful commercial robot because
they solve a similarly discrete problem.

It is understandable that we have not yet seen the type of commercial
breakthroughs that we so highly anticipate. Give it another 20 years...

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car#History)

[1] [http://www.thejournal-news.net/opinion/commentary/here-s-
loo...](http://www.thejournal-news.net/opinion/commentary/here-s-looking-at-
you-the-year-was/article_565162d6-99f9-11e4-8ff9-bf9e0d2432b5.html)

~~~
jacquesm
A nice segue is that especially in manufacturing robots are plentiful. From
pick-and-place units that move too fast to follow with the naked eye to
welding robots and so on. In a way a current car manufacturer is a series of
giant robots glued together with a relatively small number of humans.

Universal robots, ones that can do basically any task that any human can do
are not even on the drawing board right now, so we're limited to these
application specific models but where they are engaged they are incredibly
effective and have all but replaced the humans that did those jobs previously.

The reason often quoted is that this is because robots can work 24x7, won't
unionize and so on, but the little fact that people usually miss is that
repeat accuracy is a very important factor in reducing part and product
failure so betting on robots means that you get a much more reliable and
consistent product out the door saving you a fortune in re-work and warranty
claims.

~~~
jnet
"the little fact that people usually miss is that repeat accuracy is a very
important factor in reducing part and product failure so betting on robots
means that you get a much more reliable and consistent product out the door
saving you a fortune in re-work and warranty claims"

That is a very good point, the other factor is that robots can collect massive
amounts of data faster and more accurately than their human counter parts.

------
drcode
I have to say I'm kind of baffled about all these companies complaining
"Regulation is hurting self driving cars!" and "Regulation is hurting drone
delivery!" when there are pretty much zero barriers to enter the consumer
robotics market for a machine that dusts your house, does your laundry, does
your dishes, picks up clutter from the floor, etc.

(And yes I realize these tasks involve surprisingly hard AI problems, but why
isn't Google already running pilots where they give people special washing
machines, laundry machines, robot-friendly book shelves, etc etc that help
mitigate the hard AI aspects of the problem?)

~~~
michaelt
In 'serious academic' robotics, if you only have one hokuyo urg lidar [1] and
one xsens mems imu [2] you're on a low budget project and you'll probably need
a bunch more sensors before your product can operate reliably unattended. But
you've already spent ten times the cost of an entry level roomba.

The kind of butler robot we can make today [3] would seem extremely expensive
for the functionality it could offer, making it hard get the sales needed to
recoup your up front engineering costs - let alone to achieve the economies of
scale needed to bring down the price on those sensors.

[1] [http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-urg-04lx-ug01-scanning-
la...](http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-urg-04lx-ug01-scanning-laser-
rangefinder.html) [2] [http://www.newark.com/xsens/mti-20-2a5g4/mems-
module-3d-moti...](http://www.newark.com/xsens/mti-20-2a5g4/mems-
module-3d-motion-tracker/dp/94X2368) [3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODGHw8uNnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODGHw8uNnY)

~~~
Tempest1981
Thanks for the links; I love this stuff. I can see the laser rangefinder [1]
being expensive. But what makes the xsens gyro/accelerometer [2] so expensive
compared to a smartphone sensor, and why does a robot need that?

~~~
michaelt
If you think that's expensive, have a look at an OXTS RT3000 [1] where you can
spend closer to $20,000 - that's the sort of thing you buy for your prototype
self-driving car. Or at least, it was when people were competing in the DARPA
Grand Challenge eleven years ago.

Applications for IMUs include dead reckoning (working out your position based
on rotation and acceleration measurements), orientation sensing (figuring out
which way is down is much easier than dead reckoning, because you can just
sense gravity), and compensating sensor readings for robot motion.

Some cheap sensors aren't very precise; you won't notice if your phone thinks
it's rotating two degrees a minute around the vertical axis, but a robot will
if it moves for five minutes then it's ten degrees off course. I haven't
looked at the market for a long time - I suspect the cheaper IMUs are better
nowerdays. Eight years ago they didn't offer very good precision and the open
source software could be very fiddly to get working, if you could get it
working at all.

[1]
[http://www.oxts.com/products/rt3000-family/](http://www.oxts.com/products/rt3000-family/)

~~~
Animats
At the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, the IMU/GPS unit that CMU's team used
required 4U of rack space and air conditioning. There's been a lot of progress
since then. The ADXRS642 MEMS gyro[1], which costs $50 in quantity, has a
drift rate of 20°/hour. Ten years ago, you were lucky to get 20°/minute from a
MEMS gyro. If you're doing sensor integration while moving, you need a stable
orientation reference. Alternatively, you can use SLAM to process video and
align to the world, which works well today.

The OXTS RT3000 has impressive specs - 1cm accuracy in world coordinates.
That's better than you need for most robotics applications that aren't running
blind. The Trimble AP10 [2] has the same functionality at much lower cost, but
is not as accurate.

A lot of progress in robotics comes from component improvement like this.
There was a time when just getting a wireless data link to your robot was a
big deal.

[1] [http://www.analog.com/en/products/mems/mems-
gyroscopes/adxrs...](http://www.analog.com/en/products/mems/mems-
gyroscopes/adxrs642.html#product-overview) [2] [http://www.trimble.com/gnss-
inertial/AP10.aspx?dtID](http://www.trimble.com/gnss-inertial/AP10.aspx?dtID)

------
lisper
There's one very simple reason that general-purpose robots have failed to
become economically viable: robots have to compete with humans, and humans are
really cheap.

I also think that not enough thought has been put into the question of: if we
do manage to replace unskilled workers with robots, what do we do with all the
people who are only capable of unskilled work? Not everyone has what it takes
to become a coder.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

~~~
kiloreux
I don't understand what you mean by humans are really cheap, you can't upgrade
a human , you can't make him faster, you can't install latest update or add
some components, the main disadvantage of robots nowadays is that we have not
yet achieved a human level AI that gives us the abilitiy to replace humans by
robots, but if we ever do that or even achieve just good advancement in it, I
strongly doubt that any "unskilled" human worker would be better or compete on
the job.

~~~
lisper
> I don't understand what you mean by humans are really cheap

Seriously? I can rent a human for $7.50 an hour. In other countries they're
even cheaper. If you want to sell me a robot to clean my house, that's your
competition.

~~~
kiloreux
That was not a real statement, I just meant that it made contradiction in my
mind, not speaking on short run, but in my country and european countries, you
need to pay a lot of money to hire someone that includes health insurance
something similar to US 401K beside so many things, so it seemed to me like on
the long run, robots are much more cheap.

~~~
potatolicious
> _" so it seemed to me like on the long run, robots are much more cheap."_

Yes, in the very long run, assuming relatively unchanging tasks and capacity
demand.

But most jobs aren't like that - industrial robotics are dominated by robots
that are purpose-designed with a singular task in mind, with a narrow envelope
for deviations. A human can be re-trained to do something completely different
than before, whereas a robot would likely have to receive completely new
hardware. A welding robot cannot become a precision fan-balancing robot, but a
human can be retrained from one task to another.

It's cheaper to train a large group of humans to do something different than
it is to upgrade the hardware & software on the same number of robots.

This means that some jobs (see: automotive manufacturing) lend themselves
easily to robotics - the throughput is steady, the capacity requirements are
stable (i.e., you don't suddenly need 5x more cars in July than in March), and
even between different models the general process is the same.

Other jobs (see: warehousing, shipping) do not lend themselves to robotics
easily - the job changes regularly as processes evolve, the capacity
requirements are chaotic (i.e., you need to scale to 10x your normal
throughput during Xmas), and there is significant variation in process
requirements (e.g., Japanese retail warehouses that run vertically instead of
horizontally).

Robots are also still astonishingly expensive and largely made-to-order with
long lead times. This means that it takes many years to break even on a robot
(whereas you can fire the human when you don't need them), and you can scale
easily with humans (it's _much_ quicker to find a human than it is to order
and receive a robot).

------
melling
I'm just going to repost what I wrote 17 days ago:

"Why are they against militarizing robots? It pays the bills. They could start
with consumers or business but it's harder to build a market. This makes it
harder to fund further development. Once the technology is developed by anyone
for non-military use, transitioning to the military is easy. There's not some
magic that prevents consumer developed technology from reaching the
battlefield."

~~~
chubot
It pays, but with heavy constraints. You are subject to cycles in the military
budget and to the government sales process.

I highly doubt Google is interested in that revenue stream. Google doesn't
just want to pay the bills -- and it doesn't need to. It wants to develop
entirely new businesses that complement its existing ones, e.g. Nest.

Also, it's bad for the brand. There are probably not many companies that sell
both weapons and consumer goods...

~~~
melling
I believe the idea in the new model is that each unit does need to pay the
bills.

~~~
rhino369
It doesn't have to be that way. Alphabet can pump money into the robotic
subsidiary forever. But it'll be more and more obvious how much of a drain it
is when the robotics company is a black hole of profits.

------
atroyn
It seems like every consumer and industrial robotics company, with the
exception of the drone makers, tends to run into trouble sooner rather than
later - and it turns out being a division of Google doesn't help that much.

Rethink Robotics for example had a great start, but soon ran into cultural
issues and weaker than expected sales. iRobot has been unable to escape the
vacuum cleaner market. KUKA and the other really big industrial robot
manufactures have started doing new things with sensor-enabled manipulators,
but the customers haven't exactly flocked.

What is it about robotics that seems to run these companies off the rails? I
worry about Fetch robotics hitting a similar barrier, despite having a pretty
clear business case.

~~~
gwern
If you take a US perspective, perhaps, but globally, there are other bright
spots. For example, after reading about iRobot's struggles to get permission
for its wireless lawnmower robots, I was surprised to look into it and
discover there were a fair number of lawnmower robot manufacturers for both
large and small suburban scale robots which reportedly work well and are
rather popular in the EU. Smaller lawns and higher labor costs speculated to
be why.

(I liked the idea, but after calculating how big our property was, only the
most expensive commercial lawnmower robot reached parity with our John Deere
Z-track riding lawn mower's capabilities, and the payback period was
implausibly long, so I'm stuck doing the mowing myself. For now.)

~~~
atroyn
I believe a lot of the autonomous mowers also require you to lay a guidewire
around the boundary of your property.

~~~
Qworg
There are a few that don't, but they require your lawn boundary to be fully
enclosed. They bump off the barriers to know to turn around.

------
Animats
The article doesn't say much. Google has two humanoid robotics companies,
Boston Dynamics (near Boston) and Schaft (near Tokyo). Schaft has better
actuators and Boston Dynamics has better control. There's no indication that
Alphabet has been able to integrate the technologies. That was the whole point
of acquiring ten robotics companies. But if they can't be brought together,
the acquisitions were pointless. None of the companies have significant
revenue or sales, so running them as a conglomerate doesn't do anything.

Alphabet is so secretive that no one can tell from the outside if they're
doing something great or getting nowhere. Boston Dynamics stopped updating
their web site after the Google acquisition. Schaft has no visible web
presence at all. Raibert, Boston Dynamics' CEO, is 67, time to retire. Who
replaces him?

------
mtgx
What I want to know is if Alphabet is still trying to make robots for war.
They promised only a year ago they wouldn't do that and wouldn't become a
defense contractor, and then a month ago we found out they "failed" to sell
their robots to the US Army.

Good thing it was only Google that had to abide by the "don't be evil" mantra
(more or less). Alphabet apparently could care less about it.

