

The latest version of Dexter walks faster and more robustly. - KB
http://anybots.com/videos.html#walking_080302_title

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jsrn
Pretty impressive! However, regarding the practical prospects of humanoid /
antropomorphic robots I remain pretty sceptical. Why? Because wheels (or
sometimes threads) are so much simpler and cheaper! It seems to me like a
classic case of "Worse is better".

The usual arguments for legged robots aren't very convincing, IMO:

\- "legged robots are better for difficult/uneven terrain": look at some
videos showing the iRobot PackBot (which runs on threads): Although it's very
small, it can climb stairs.

\- "humanoid robots have an advantage because people can interact more
naturally with them": maybe, but people also interact with Roombas, dogs, cars
etc. - none of which are humanoid. Regarding the Roomba, I have read an
article that many people name their Roomba and even pity them if it gets
stuck. So the question will be: is the advantage of "better interaction" worth
the considerably higher price for a humanoid robot body?

\- Isaac Asimov said that humanoid robots will have an advantage because the
whole world is already build for humans. Again, maybe - but when the car was
introduced, we rebuilt the whole infrastructure (i.e. streets) to meet our new
machines' needs.

Perhaps I'm just not getting the point of humanoid robots - apart from beeing
technically impressive and cool to watch.

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npk
I think you answered your own question: "Isaac Asimov said that humanoid
robots will have an advantage because the whole world is already build for
humans."

Given the choice, do you really think we would rebuild the whole world's
infrastructure?

~~~
jsrn
"Given the choice, do you really think we would rebuild the whole world's
infrastructure?"

No - because we already _have_ built the infrastructure in such a way that
most important places can be reached with wheels rather than legs.

And if I had the choice of

1\. maybe buying a small ramp for the stairs in my (not yet existing) house so
that a wheeled robot can drive upstairs

2\. buying a humanoid robot that can use the stairs himself

I would of course consider the costs - my guess is that the ramp will be much
cheaper. What would you do?

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jedberg
As Trevor was kicking his legs and pushing on his knees, I was waiting for
Dexter to turn around and slap him silly. Guess I've been reading too much
SciFi.

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mynameishere
Just wondering: Do the people in robotics realize that the real money is in
getting machines to pick cabbages and the like? These sorts of inventions
(like any others) really need to replace labor to be economic.

~~~
pchristensen
Picking cabbages is a pretty hard problem. I'm pretty sure they realize the
economic potential, but Dexter took his first baby steps not too long ago.

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henning
"Do note that the "total" time spent (e.g., time spent in Ruby, instead of
waiting on IO) is much lower for Sphinx than for Solr. For both of them, the
socket overhead is a constant penalty, and won't increase."

Hey, why not write a pure Ruby indexing and search engine?

Oh right, because Ruby is too slow.

~~~
tlrobinson
Wrong article, perhaps?

