It's a nice piece of machinery. Looks like they finally went all-electric and got rid of the hydraulics. The new model is much less bulky.
The task it is doing is undemanding. It's just moving things from one set of large slots to another. No need for precision placement, unstructured bin-picking, or object separation. If it could pick up engine covers from the messy pile seen atop one of the racks and slot them into the storage unit, that would be more impressive. It's cool to see this done with a humanoid, but off the shelf industrial robots could do that job. This is the same place where Rethink Robotics got stuck. They could do simple object movements in mostly-structured situations, but so can lots of other simpler approaches.
Amazon, despite substantial efforts, still doesn't have full robot picking. About two years ago, Amazon announced their "Sparrow" picking robot. But that seems to be experimental. It's not seen in videos of Amazon warehouses in 2024. Amazon is using the Agility humanoid, but only experimentally.[1]
This is how Amazon currently does picking.[2] Racks of product come to the picker on robotic platforms. The picking system projects a light square on the space in the rack from which the picker should take the product. The picker picks the item, waves it under a barcode scanner, and drops it in an outgoing bin. Repeat for 8 hours. The job requires no more than a room-temperature IQ. Machines should think. People should work.
Have you noticed how in second 13 it rotates the lower body clockwise while the upper body rotates counter-clockwise in order to optimize the movements to archive the goal?
All (bipedal/quadrupedal) robots I've seen behave either like an animal or a human, but this one is something else. Imagine the inverse kinematics required to perform such a movement, and how precise even the slight left foot's clockwise rotation is.
It does these very uncanny movements multiple times in the video, this video less about moving that thing from here to there than about how it does it. Also the recovery it had when it failed to insert one of the objects.
> Have you noticed how in second 13 it rotates the lower body clockwise while the upper body rotates counter-clockwise in order to optimize the movements to archive the goal?
Could be a fancy optimization of course, but could as well be a side effect of a decoupled planning of the locomotion part and the upper body pick and place.
Algo could be: plan a path for a lower body motion from pose (4dof) A to pose B. And given pose B plan the upper body place of the tray in the target. If no constraints are broken plan both in parallel so it looks like one smooth behavior.
There's something weird in its movement optimization, towards the middle it surprises the camera person by needlessly walking too close to it, a couple of steps away from the destination slots.
Nevertheless, it fascinating how the legs/torso/head spin in different directions. It's scary even if you know it is physically weaker than its hydraulic cousins.
On the shift from hydraulic to electric: for years Marc Raibert and others at Boston Dynamics expressed doubts that a non-hydraulic humanoid could be made to perform as well in that package.
Because of actuator density- a humanoid has a high number of actuators. Also power density, and they did a lot of work in molding the hydraulic actuators directly into the arms and legs to make them compact. The bulk is all in the backpack pumps, power pack, etc.
So this move to all-electric represents real growth in Boston Dynamics being able to make compact motors that meet their needs of performance.
I am betting this new robot is less capable of the explosive dynamics of the old one. I am not expecting dance performances and backflips from this one right away. But I am expecting them to work toward that kind of performance.
Hydraulics have a massive benefit that the actual actuators have amazing power density - and the actual bulky hydraulic pump and valves can be far away. Also, the pump can be shared with many actuators, making the whole system smaller and lighter when you have 50 actuators and only need to use 5 of them at full power at a time.
Electrics win for energy efficiency and no-leaky-fluid, and also are improving pretty quick.
> On the shift from hydraulic to electric: for years Marc Raibert and others at Boston Dynamics expressed doubts that a non-hydraulic humanoid could be made to perform as well in that package.
Then Schaft won the DARPA Robotic Challenge in 2013 with their all-electric humanoid robot with liquid-cooled motors.
They beat out Boston Dynamics' Atlas.
Then Google bought Schaft. Google got bored with robotics, couldn't find a buyer for them, and Schaft was shut down, along with several other Google robotics acquisitions.
The visualization of a 3d model of the engine cover and the points of the racking system highlighted as spheres in the visualization shows quite how much task-specific code there must be in this demo.
I don't think you'd be able to get this to move other objects or to other types of shelves without getting a programmer involved for a few days at least.
In [2], it's very surprising that the system is designed so that the worker must use steps to access bins on the transporter. Since this seems so obviously and counterintuitively bad for the workflow I assume there must be a very, very good reason for it. Would be interesting to know what it is.
That surprised me, too, because a previous version of the system used smaller bin stacks and no steps.
Amazon could have gone in the other direction. The layout could be designed so that the picker sits on a swivel stool and never stands at all. That's what they do when they test robot picking - there's one human-sized robot arm on a turntable mount doing the picking.
> The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
Anyone who don't know what manufacturing automation looked like for past decades should go watch those "factory tours" video or two. Then write down what are shared characteristics of manually handled objects in it and what are deltas between those videos and this. There are just way too many fantasies around here.
At first, humanoids will not be used for these inflexible, old-style mass manufacturing factories. Humanoids can automate where flexibility is needed. E.g. a baker baking 5000 breads a day for a local community cannot afford the capital expenditure to automate every step in his pipeline with these ABB machines. He could afford to automate with one of these new humanoids though, as the same machine first does step 1, then step 2 all the way to the end of the recipe, in a kitchen which is already there.
Same idea with individual production. A toyota factory builds you one exact copy of a car in any colour you want (as long as it's black). But we might go back to a more individualised default in manufacturing, where for example tailor made clothes become affordable to most people again.
> to automate every step in his pipeline with these ABB machines.
That's still too much "inside the box" thinking.
That baker doesn't need "automate everything", in fact, no-one does.
What "that baker" needs, is to rank work on effort, cross sectioned with "costs to automate". And then automate the top item or items only.
The baker needs a machine to knead the dough. Special tools to cut the dough of twenty cookies at once with minimal waste. Trays and tools that can be cleaned in a dishwasher. A bread slicing machine.
A bakery that can be mopped in one go, rather than a fully automated humanoid mopping machine.
This is an analogy for all automation: we don't need to cover 100%, be fully autonomous, 100% flexible. We need to automate the hardest part, even if that's boring tech. Then the next hardest part. And so on.
Those top items were already automated long ago. What remains is a fractal scattering of irregular tasks that would be excessively costly to automate with single-task machinery that is 0% flexible. -100% flexible, considering most machines require the process itself to be bent around its limitations, and the costs trickle all the way down to the features and properties of the final output.
An omnitasker that can emulate a significant chunk of "all the stuff you just give up and have a human spend an hour on" is precisely what the baker (and countless others) need after hitting that threshold.
Whenever I think about automation, I, of course, think about having toddlers in the house.
Toddlers are a transient disruption to the household logistics operation. They induce novel challenges. Their clothes are have different form factors, and may be dirtied in novel and interesting ways. Their nutritional demands are only partially-overlapping with the preexisting household diet. They introduce hundreds of small toylike objects into the environment. Even their dishware is smaller, flimsier and more numerous, disrupting any existing dish-washing workflows. And the development (or purchase) of permanent solutions to these problems is in some sense wasteful because the toddlers will stop being toddlers before too long, and you will have to pivot again.
The holy trinity of washer, dryer, dishwasher solves a relatively high percentage of household labor but the tail is very long. The purpose of the above digression on toddlers is to illustrate that some household labor disruptions are transient and really not worth developing specific solutions to permanently resolve.
This household example is both a true example of the problem and a metaphor for this type of situation which occurs in all human environments. There is always a long tail. There are always changes to processes with knock-on effects that leave gaps in preexisting workflows. And the solution of final resort has always been human manual labor. There are always transient solutions that require transient workarounds. And this long tail is where it will be enormously helpful to have humanoid form factor robots. This is true for exactly the same reasons that a young parent would appreciate having a humanoid robot in the house, to pick up clothes off the floor and fold clean ones, gather up toys and put them in their appropriate storage bin, and clean the table and floor and nearby walls (and possibly ceiling) after meals.
IIUC, while this type of mass manufacturing is very efficient, it also limits the materials and what the final product can be.
Especially in food manufacturing, they need to add certain chemicals in the food ingredients so that the machines can process them and that's what separates the cheap mass produced food from artisan food.
A humanoid robot might be able to apply traditional processes and make artisan, additive free products cheap and available.
If we end up having practically unlimited energy(which we actually have, just not harnessed fully yet), we can also have small production centers on every corner that produce bespoke products using humanoid robots and traditional tools instead of having centralized and highly specialized and streamlined mass production.
Someone is drinking the 'bespoke artisan' koolaid.
Food additives are almost entirely about making products more visually appealing or shelf stable. Cellulose to keep cheese from sticking, nitrogen to keep meat from oxidizing, etc.
Your 'bespoke artisan' products are mostly improved marketing and improved staging (better lighting, less crowded stores, more personal service, etc)
what a relief it will be to be released from doing manual tasks for a living and to be able to finally engage every waking moment in an all against all struggle for power.
half of the population has IQ below average. what 'idea' are you talking about?
Actually that's getting interesting. For non-physical jobs we already got significant boost from LLMs. Robots will be another wave when they get cheap enough. For robot like on the video $20K price for mechanics looks achievable.
While humanoid robots are neat, if not uncanny, I would love to see robots with forms optimized for their work. A large octopus with legs would be ideal for this sort of parts handling job.
I think the exact point they’re trying to make is that a humanoid robot can pick up one shift exactly where a human left off. No custom robotics, no workplace changes, etc.
This is huge for the industry. Smarter Every Day visited a frisbee factory and they had automated a bunch of things. However, every automation point was extremely protected (fenced off) so that a bumbling human couldn’t walk somewhere and get a limb ripped off. If I remember correctly they joked that it was OSHA or something, which it turned out to be.
The effort required to change a process shouldn't be underestimated.
Especially considered that industrial environments are already (a) automated for lowest-hanging fruit things (e.g. moving stuff around at human height) & (b) optimized around human capabilities for the remaining things. Substituting a not-humanlike robot would require reconfiguring a lot of existing automation around it.
If you have "like a human, but costs less" that can be plugged into any existing still-human process? You can literally swap them in.
Eventually we'll get to hyperoptimized machines, but an easier sales story to say "We automate your existing human processes."
When steam and coal engines gave way to gas and electric engines in factories, it took decades before factories were reconfigured to adjust to the smaller sized engines that didn't require one major axle running through the entire factory. As a consequence the first gas engines were huge - over time they shrunk. I bet the same will happen with robotics, where humanoid will be the primary form factor at first for general tasks, then more efficient forms will emerge as processes are updated.
These efficiënt forms are there. In use. Proven. Have been for decades.
Cranes, carts, lorries, conveyor belts (with vision), my robot vacuum cleaner, my bread baking machine, a car wash, a dishwasher, the ticket gates at the underground, the coffee machine at our office and so on.
Yet, there are still millions of humans working in factories.
There is value to the human form, our versatility and adaptability.
A machine that replicated a human would have incredible economic value (though not for the people whose jobs it replaced). A machine that exceeded a human in versatility, e.g. by having more arms, even more so.
Yes, there are. But that's not caused by lack of humanoid robots, but because these humans are rediculously cheap.
There's absolutely no way that automation and tech can undercut (effective) slave labor.Though already this is happening: your tshirts and socks are probably not hand-knitted by "Bangladeshi children" or Chinese "prisoners", but by machines tailor-made (pun intended) for t-shirt and sock-knitting. This is happening slowly, and in the supply chain there's still loads of manual labor - cotton picked and processed for these socks is more and more automated, but still requires armies of cheap farm-hands.
And then it's really hard to undercut the price of cheap "western" labor with full automation in many sectors. Part of that is due to some form of 90/10 rule: the last 10% of automation is magnitudes more expensive. And many automation leads to a higher TCO, as the people programming, maintaining and optimizing the robots are far more expensive than an "army" of low-wage workers.
Humanoid robots may be an answer in some future, but currently and in near future will certainly not solve these economics. If ever.
I think you're right, but the humanoid phase in manufacture will probably be an intermediate phase, for the reasons krunck points out. A 100% adapted to the function robot is where productivity is.
I keep hearing this but I just think it’s silly, for basically any factory, it’s trivial to change the configuration of a space so a better suited robot can operate rather than build robots that can fit into human sized spaces.
Yes there will be use cases but it just seems like a problem looking for a solution most of the time.
Optimization isn't efficient on the grand scale of things. Think of these robots more as exchangeable worker units. Lets say the warehouse isn't accepting many packages that day. So you don't need as many robots at the loading dock. But we have a lot of product that needs to be inventoried or shelved. Send a couple over and have them start doing it right away.
You actually end up running a warehouse with less robots because they can easily be repurposed for other duties.
Imagine you're working your 35-hour shift at the Fulfillment™ Center and all around you there's robotic eldritch horrors scurrying through the two-storey high shelves
Factory robots that move in general are kind of gimmicks, except for those roomba things for Amazon warehouses.
An assembly line with robotic arms has been standard for a long time now. And having many such arms working at the same time is normal. And each robotic arm will be doing one extremely narrowly defined task.
Anything involving autonomous judgment and mobility introduces uncertainty.
Neuralink-equipped wageslaves mind-projecting into robo-octopuses, traversing the storehouse-grid with the aid of their many-suckered appendages. Navigating via implicitly interfacing with the warehouse's AI overseer.
Even if you don't have an assembly line and more of a job shop. A stacker crane is a better transportation method and you can build each station to be able to load from the crane directly. So the only case where you need a robot arm is to take a part and put it in a fixture.
I liked the Tesla snake robot for charging.[1] But it upset many people.
It looks complicated but is a rather simple mechanical design. There are several motors in the base pulling on cables. The arm itself is just segments, disks, and cables. So all the complexity is in the base, and you can surround that with a metal or concrete box to prevent damage. Arm replacement wouldn't be too expensive.
Tesla is now touting wireless car charging, but that's a lot of power to transmit through air.
The legs do seem like a huge overcomplication. I can't think of many situations where they would be worth the added cost/complexity (compared to simple wheels). Sure they can walk stairs, but a place that employs freaking robots could easily make it robot accessible too, it would seem.
Did you see previous Atlas videos where this things jumps, does backflips and runs up stairs? The whole point is to make it operate in spaces designed for humans.
Bipedalism is great to evolve on uneven terrain. Here it seems to just slow the process. Also, it uses its second hand for balance instead of achieving work, a counter weight would be as effective. In a factory, where the floor is flat, a human sized self moving robot 2 or 3 wheels would be way more effective, longer arms with more joins that are not mimicking humans one could also be better. There is already a lot of automation/robots in industry and it never look like a human. Even in our houses the best approach to automation never look like a human (eg. vacuum cleaner). I think that the only part of our body that would worth copying is the hand.
Humans are precariously tall. Good for spotting threats but not for navigating terrain. Four legs are better, with a lower center of gravity. Look at mountain goats for example.
We already have highly specialized robots. They’re usually built for specific situations and are expensive and immobile. The goal here is to provide a robot that can fill as many roles as possible and the best template for that is humans around which the entire world has been built.
Or just a bunch of conveyor belts, magnets, clips etc. A "boring" but proven, optimized, sorting machine really.
Though the demo is awesome, the use case is bad. This "problem" of sorting and moving parts around, has long been "solved". It can be forever optimized, sure. But humanoid robots are definitely not that optimization.
The entire built environment to date is designed for humans
It’s the same reason why companies are throwing money at a self driving car which can coexist with manually driven cars, rather than building roads specifically for autonomy
Because building anything infrastructure related in the US, especially for rail, is a such a Sisyphean task that it might actually be cheaper to just build an autonomous vehicle
One immediate use I can see for this robot is racking and energizing circuit breakers in electrical switchgear, which is one of the most dangerous things an electrician does. Arc flashes are very bad for humans, robots can be replaced easily.
I’m not talking about using hot sticks used for disconnecting and reconnecting live conductors, I’m talking about removing and replacing switchgear breakers for maintenance and testing from energized switchgear.
There is a risk of arc flash when you disconnect the bus fingers and also when you reconnect them to the bus, and a robot is easier to replace than a human.
The video is impressive, but how does it learn? How long does it take before it can do something new? I realize this is still very much a research project, but I'd love to understand how it works.
Happy to be corrected, but AI isn't mentioned in the title or video anywhere. What's with the expectation of learning new tasks? All this would be impressive regardless of that.
“Atlas is autonomously moving engine covers between supplier containers and a mobile sequencing dolly, using ML to detect and localize the environment fixtures and individual bin. There are no prescribed or teleoperated movements.“
Whereas my current "robot", aka my dishwasher, has them done in 20 mins (or 90 mins eco setting).
Specialized automation is there, proven, efficient. It can be improved, sure (easier (un)loading?), but I doubt a generalized, humanoid robot is the best way towards these improvements.
Pretty sure my dishwasher takes a couple hours (maybe always on eco?). I could hand-wash them in 15 minutes though — I would just rather not.
I wouldn't really care if the robot was up all night doing dishes as long as they were done in the morning. And, you know, the robot did their work quietly.
Unitree is catching up to Boston Dynamics in locomotion, but has not surpassed them yet I think. Unitree's real advantage is the much lower cost of their hardware and their ability to mass produce their robots.
But IMO manipulation is harder than locomotion, both in hardware and software, and neither company is convincingly ahead there. I think the uncut laundry demo from Physical Intelligence a few days ago is better than anything shown by Unitree or BD for manipulation. https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0#:~:text=Af....
I don't really want a robot wandering around doing laundry. I think what most people want is a box you dump clothes in and they come out folded, an extra machine next to the dryer. That would be a genuine time saver. I hate scaling Mount Foldmore.
I don't want more machines taking up space in my home. I don't want a bunch of special purpose "smart" devices with buggy software and dedicated apps requiring logins and firmware updates to plug security holes. I want one robot that can do it all. I'd get rid of my security system, cameras, smart thermostat, dishwasher, clothes washer, stand mixer, toaster, etc etc.
I put the laundry on this morning, came into the kitchen and got a bread mix going, made some toast while that was mixing. The dishwasher was just finishing. Having to wait for one machine to serially finish doing each job not quite as well as a dedicated machine, before doing the next job, doesn't sound ideal. Plus when the dishwasher breaks I can still have toast.
The robot can do the dishes and the laundry while you aren't even there. No need for that to happen during breakfast! It can start making breakfast before you even wake up, if you want.
Clearly it’s not easy to solve the folding machine problem because otherwise we would have one of those already. I absolutely wouldn’t mind a robot helper walking around the house and going what my maid currently does.
They put a lot of work into the control algorithms that allow the robots to move. From a control theory perspective, being hit is a disturbance that the control system is able to reject to maintain the intended pose/motion.
You have to make sure that robots know their place. Today you treat them too gently, tomorrow you have a robot uprising destroying the whole humanity on your hands.
Haven't the last century of sci-fi books and movies taught you this?
What? The humanoid robot in the video is walking on the most even surface possible. Boston Dynamics has a more impressive walking video from 11 years ago (obviously restricted by the hardware at the time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6Okylclb8
Yes, human-looking gait is nice, but it isn't worth anything if it can't translate to real-world settings.
Something rubs me the wrong way when the dog is hit and kicked, and we don't have a dog.
I know it's a robot but the same could be demonstrated without clear violence.
what if the robot has little vials of acetone, IPA, etc. to wash off its lenses, while switching to mm-wave vision (not even dead reackoning) returns the favor to the offending human while cleaning its lens...
Unfortunately some humans are just violent in nature. Or perhaps most. When robots become as intelligent as humans, some people might enjoy abusing them like they once enjoyed abusing people of different skin color.
LMAO Boston Dynamics used to have a guy randomly coming into the frame and giving the robot a kick and show it could recover, Unitree goes all-out kung fu on them.
I'm impressed but I'm also surprised to see the robot stop and appear to think. I would have thought the computing and sensors wouldn't take so long to form decisions.
I wouldn't be surprised if the slowest part of the system is the API call to a legacy warehouse management system that takes several seconds to respond to get the next bin to target.
I don't know why people are impressed. Robots are hard and this is a big step forward but it's still useless. This is far from being as functional as automotive manufacturing robots or even vacuum cleaners. This is nothing like the goal we're striving for with these things. There's very a long way to go until this does what we want.
Why not be impressed? The reasons you gave are enough for the majority of people following along. The exciting parts are the steps along the way. Once we have something that is actually usable and integrated into our everyday lives, it will lose its novelty fast.
So that means we just stop innovating and not try to go beyond what we already have? This is not regression since this has no effect on the robots we already have, industrial robots are on their own innovation branch. These are prototypes, a glimpse into the future at what's possible with more experimentation and technological progression.
Impressive. The machine learning application in these domains is the real game changer.
PS: Isn't that the Lord of the Lithium, the Guardian of the Tunnels has the robot prototypes that not only serve drinks but do the small talk with full self driving AGI already?
The cloth receptacle is being compressed like a spring.
It seems like when the robot thought the object was put away (or some safety feedback mechanism of receiving too much force feedback activates), it "relaxes" its actuators and goes limp, say.
Then the stored force from the spring is released. What we're seeing with the jump is the robot rebalancing itself in order to remain upright.
Do you work with servos? I do, and what we see here is exactly what happens when the arm control loop essentially "turns off" because it is not expecting to hold position.
In this state it doesn't take much counter force at all to imbalance the system. You're also ignoring the momentum of the arm being pushed back. Then it is the supervisory control loop (balancing the robot) that "over reacts" to maintain current position. It is this active control that is responsible for the jolt we see, not the spring itself.
This is a job that currently employs a massive number of humans in Amazon warehouses. When you order a product on Amazon, they currently have autonomous robots that bring in entire shelves of that product up to a person standing at a counter, who picks the product from the shelf, puts it into a box and sends it off for shipping. This could take all those jobs away.
Yes they definitely do, see very similar numbered organizers in the background of this video [1]. In auto mfg they need to reliably build dozens of configurations on one line while maintaining impeccable part tracking for auditing and triage purposes. Each shelf on the left could be a different version of the engine cover for a different trim and the shelf on the right will be brought to a station where workers will pick from it based on the number the computer tells them for the exact vehicle in front of them.
This helps make sure the customer gets what they purchased and helps for QC and recalls. If one batch is bad then this system allows them to pinpoint down to the exact VINs that were affected.
I think whenever I see humanoid robots like this: What is the battery life? I imagine this will be a critical limitation on these, until further notice.
Well yes but we can perform 16 hours straight then. If you look at what elite alpinists can do (or more like are rarely forced to do) it can be easily 72 hours full on brutal effort on physical and mental limits, with 0 margin for mistake, no food or water. Not so much case here now I presume.
Not that that would be a bummer here nor the baseline, but humans can be properly amazing and we keep stretching the possible further and further.
A company might happily have 4 hour shifts to facilitate charging the robot workforce, if that means they dont need to deal with unionizing, smoke-breaking, hung over, late coming, slow working and generally unpleasant humans in their workforce.
Swapping batteries is often suggested, but rarely actually used in practice due to a wide range of logistical issues like thermal management, cost, etc.
Humanoid robots are often suggested, but rarely actually used in practice due to a wide range of issues. When they come to market, they will bring with them new technologies, like power management, humanoid robots, etc.
Humans have an uptime of 16 hours, but generally speaking can only operate professionally for an 8 hour span. The other 8 hours are spent mostly doing personal maintenance and refueling their physical and mental capabilities.
Oh, and humans have traditionally banded together to punish those who ask for more than 8 hours a day or 5 days a week, and have even historically gotten very murdery over the subject. Buyer beware!
How much PTO does the robot use? Are they a culture fit? Do they have any insights for process improvement?
If robots can replace humans for the most monotonous tasks, I'm all for it, as long as it doesn't hurt living conditions for those humans.
But all these robots are only shown to us in very carefully controlled conditions. If a human was doing what we saw this robot doing in a factory, they'd probably get disciplined unless they increased their speed by 400%. This is state of the art, I presume.
Maybe this kind of thing will be useful some day, but it feels like that day is a long way off.
Definitely controlled, but a pole to the "chest" of Atlas shows it's relatively stable on its feet and capable of recovery, though we have no idea how many takes that took.
As far as speed, it depends on what the limitations are. We know electric motors in general are capable of moving faster, so presumably the limits are with computation, to which I'd point out that Moore's law is still hanging on. Compared to Honda's Asimo in 2000 BD's Atlas robot in 2016 was nothing short of phenomenal progress, but that took 16 years.
Hopefully it doesn't take another 16, but we'll see. Once there are useful commercially available humanoid robots on the market, progress is likely to accelerate.
If the compute needed is linear, then 4x means it's not far off. I would foresee it in a decade. This speed is also fast enough for household robots as it is.
this robot has arms and legs and apparently some measure of autonomy now as well. It can change it's own batteries!
Which, humans do at least once a day, among tending to other biological needs as well. So the question is what's a useful run time if there's a bank of swappable batteries it can run back to refill from? Even if it had to go and swap batteries every two hours, for a factory robot that wouldn't be insurmountable.
Looking at the cool non-human movement of the head, the upper torso and the legs i'm wondering if changing the legs so that they are symmetrical, instead of the knees only bending in one direction, is a coming improvement. That way it could walk forward and backward.
Any one's tried LLM on a bipedal robot? I feel like with Anthropic's Computer Use (LLM trained with visual and controls a mouse), there start to be some overlapping
How long before someone can buy a robot to do a manual labor job for them? I mean, buy a robot and send it to some company to do a daily job where the company pays the robot owner for the use of the robot?
I don't pretend to hold a crystall ball or magically see the future, but arguments could be construed why it would happen:
Let us consider a spectrum of splitting differences, and their extremes:
Consider a factory that runs 3 human shifts, and N full-time labour positions.
In one extreme the company buys for each 3-human-shift position a single robot price.
In another extreme, some workers decide to buy a robot on their own, and hope to send it to the factory.
Now consider 3 robots are bought per 3-human shift position, i.e. one robot corresponding to each human worker. If the robot follows the worker home, it would spend 2 / 3rds of the time at home, and one third of the time at work. So a company could pay a third of each robot for 3 shifts. What is won by whom?
The companies:
1) paid the same amount of money
2) don't need space to store a large stock of backup robots (suppose your robot broke down and needs a few days to get repaired, the company can ask your colleagues from other shifts if they want to rent out one of their robots, so instead of having 2 robots in the household, some will only have 1 for a few days and they will get compensated by whoever was responsible for the damage, if it occurred in job related conditions or leisure conditions)
From the perspective of the employees:
1) Instead of paying 100% of the robot price, you only pay 66.6%
2) Instead of blindly hoping to find an employer where you can send your robot for work, your employer is organizing this for you
From the perspective of the robot makers:
1) Sales triple
2) gather real world data 3 times faster than robot makers not participating in this type of scheme
3) just like the factories, having a larger base of robots means the shot noise on the stream of incoming robots needing a repair is buffered, so capex on the repair centers decrease
From the perspective of jurisdictions, power blocs, and robot warfare:
1) Your economy learns 3 times as fast compared to blind ideological jurisdictions that believe the optimum must lie at the extremes: either company buys 1 robot, or 3 employees each buy their own robot
From a different perspective one can argue much simpler: we already see this in action with company cars, robots for human transportation operated for work part of the time and operated for leisure in the rest of the time, complete with myriad of rules and regulations to determine who pays for repairs and how or when the damage was incurred.
The company is just going to buy the robot directly. Why would they middle man things like that? Alternatively if they just need the robots for shifts, they will rent them out from some central provider.
I think you would have to start a small business like rent your robot to do housecleaning for your neighbors, that being said housecleaning will probably quickly become way more competitive and you would have to undercut bigger businesses.
Funny you mention the only possible future capitalism model where we aren't mostly all dead in a ditch... (companies forced to pay people for using "their" bot) but it will never happen.
The companies buy the robots, and just shoot the employees in the head as they leave the robot store as an act of mercy.
How is its situational awareness? While walking with its elbow out carousing the item, would it avoid an object that would be out of its view by the time it was about to collide with its extended elbow?
See, this is a real video. Compare it with the obvious cgi fake that was put out a few months ago by Figure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw I still can't believe how noone has called them out on that one.
Well, anything could be fake these days even the Boston Dynamic's video could be fake in this day and age but...
I tend to believe both videos probably are not fake. With speech recognition, text to speech AGI and the advancements in machine learning as applied to robotics, it is not impossible for many or any committed enough group of engineers with financial means to make some notable progress on that front.
But Figure 01 do have real videos of their robot walking. Compare the wobbliness in those videos vs the one I've linked. The difference is easily noticeable. One moves like a physical thing, the other moves like a scripted rigid body simulation from a game cutscene.
Also, I didn't say what they demoed was impossible (other than the unnaturally smooth motion). There's probably good reason they went with a cgi video, but we don't know.
Motion is the telltale sign. It's too smooth in their video. Real physical mechanisms shake a bit, the actuators have a bit of backlash, the whole structure wobbles a bit when a limb is moved due to torque, etc. The micro-movements are missing from the Figure 01 video, because they are hard to simulate convincingly. Basically, their robot moves like Optimis Prime in a Transformers movie. Unnatural, and un-physical.
You might not be able to see it if you don't know what to look for, just like how some people seem unable to notice when that ugly motion interpolation is turned on their TV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I often call out the cgi "enhancements" that I notice on Boston Dynamics videos. This one doesn't seem to have any that I can tell. On others, however, when I point them out, I get borderline religious vitriol pushback.
From what I've observed, (so preface the following with "It seems to me that:")
BD obviously has a well-honed "playback" tool. They have the ability to command the robot to operate in a new environment, record its own movements to sub-millimeter accuracy, and record the environment (it has a live 3d point map after all.). Then, they load in the recorded environment+motion data, and play it back as a 3D scene. Naturally, this would be needed to analyze the performance and make software and hardware iterations. However, this data is likely also used to re-create a digital scene for the purposes of cgi enhancement of a performance that's intended to be recorded and released to Youtube. Similar to how Favreau uses a giant screen to approximate the lighting on the chroma-keyed subjects[1] as they perform, this data -- a giant shiny rectangle goes here, a window and a flashing blue light bulb there, these steps over here -- combined with accurate camera motion data, is then used to create a digital model with the exact shadows that one would need to create a more realistic "fake video" in the first place. The trick is that Boston Dynamics then takes the original take (or iterations of takes of it running the exact same sequence), and iterate a cgi-enhanced version of their "cool dance video" that the marketing team then signs off on. "Ohh yeah, that's what our vision is. We don't want them to see shaky appendages, or micro-stutters. Add in some extra scuff marks, too! Perfect. Upload it."
I can see that. Because you're posting incoherent scenarios with no evidence.
Meanwhile we have Spot being deployed in Australian mines for surveillance where the environment is constantly changing. Not sure how they would accomplish this if everything they do is CGI.
I did not say everything they do is CGI. Your response is prime example. Just doubting Boston Dynamic's MARKETING brings out the strawman fallacies. Simply proves the marketing is working. I don't doubt the robots exist. How stupid do you think the average HN commenter is?
So in 2013 Google bought Boston Dynamics, then later sold them in 2017. The rumor is that BD didn't play nice with the rest of Google. They wanted to just keep doing whatever they wanted and not be told what to do.
I think that if Tesla had bought BD, it may have been more trouble than it's worth. They might have had to fire a lot of the staff, and then I'm not sure what they would have been left with. Tesla is trying to optimize for production cost and mass manufacturing whereas BD doesn't care about cost. It also seems to me like BD hasn't done much in the AI realm. They've focused a lot more on the locomotion and have been using classic robotics techniques.
But can you buy them, not pay them, feed them for pennies, keep them alive forever, work them 24hrs/365days, and never fear they will organize and revolt?
The BD demos are cool and I’ve been seeing them for probably a decade or more now, but what exactly do these robots do? Besides for cool demos, where are they actually used?
Compare this to the human controlled puppets Tesla demonstrated. Tesla made a big show of something Disney could do years ago. While Boston Dynamics is quietly building the real thing and showing us footage of it actually working.
The difference is Disney doesn't have any factories. I'd bet good money Tesla has Optimus doing real work in their factories, at scale, long before anyone else.
And it's one thing to have a cute demo showcased under ideal scenarios and another to have it deployed in mission critical environments around real people.
We have had robots stamping parts for years. There is no need for a humanoid style configuration. Meanwhile what is needed and far more complex are robots that can interact with unpredictable people in unpredictable environments.
Boston Dynamics has already demonstrated they can do this.
You would just change the machine that the human uses. If a task is too difficult and hence needs a human yesterday, and if there is a solution that a humanoid robot can now do today then you would simply get rid of all of the humanoid robotics surrounding the core problem. Even if that means bolting the humanoid to the floor just to use that single part you need.
In which aspect is this better than a human?* It's slower, energy-wise more expensive (a human with just a sandwich can work for hours), less preciss and error-prone. As a Manager, I would prefer a person that I can blame (corporative and legally) if something goes wrong, that being responsible (legally, mainly!) if this robot makes a huge mistake.
* From a business point of view. This is an incredible techinal achievement, I don't want to sound like this is not impressive. But it seems that every new development seems to focus on how they can replace humans or be better at or do things that we usually do.
Selling one product and using the profits from that to create a second product is how businesses work. So if/when Tesla/anybody is selling their humanoid robot and those profits pay for going to feed the NVIDIA supercomputer that they're using to train models to run on robots, and to fund development of robot 2.0, that's exactly where we'll be.
> As a Manager, I would prefer a person that I can blame (corporative and legally) if something goes wrong, that being responsible (legally, mainly!) if this robot makes a huge mistake.
Might you not prefer working with a colleague who brings skills and knowledge to the work environment, understands the business, is motivated to improve the operation, and can respectfully discuss the challenges that you face as a team?
Someone who, if treated fairly and with respect, may help build success as your co-worker and perhaps even community as your neighbour?
In exchange for a decent wage and an affordable sandwich, of course.
the robot can work 24/7 7 days a week, and if you consider paying the human employee at the end of the month and not just providing a sandwich per shift then the energy costs are not that high.
How much time the robot can work without recharging / maintenance? What's the throughput for the tasks? In the demo it only carried one object and it took it several seconds to move it. A person could do that faster, better, etc. It's real nice, but if you can convince a factory owner to replace people with this you are the best salesman in the world.
I'm not a salesman but I imagine if you're trying to sell them to a factory owner, you'd play up the problems with the worst humans. Humans come in hungover, still drunk, or not at all. And don't call in. They complain about every. little. thing. "Why do I have to do it this way?" "I don't want to do it like that".
They take long bathroom breaks (and think you don't notice, because they think you're stupid.) They steal. They fight with each other and need managing aka children's therapist for their bullshit. Which never stops. You can stop wasting your time dealing with the "human touch" and get back to what you really want - making more widgets so you can sell more widgets so you can make enough money for that kitchen remodel/winter/summer home/yacht/European vacation/jet.
Fire them and replace them with RobotWorker. It doesn't get drunk and cause fights or HR incidents because it can't keep it in it's pants. They'll work all through the night and through every holiday, without the same trouble of having a second and third shift. You don't need to follow OSHA with these things, though you still don't want to damage them - there's a support contract but that's unnecessary downtime for you, and you don't want that. Still, you can just replace a robot's arm. Just imagine the lawsuits when that happens to a human employee.
The task it is doing is undemanding. It's just moving things from one set of large slots to another. No need for precision placement, unstructured bin-picking, or object separation. If it could pick up engine covers from the messy pile seen atop one of the racks and slot them into the storage unit, that would be more impressive. It's cool to see this done with a humanoid, but off the shelf industrial robots could do that job. This is the same place where Rethink Robotics got stuck. They could do simple object movements in mostly-structured situations, but so can lots of other simpler approaches.
Amazon, despite substantial efforts, still doesn't have full robot picking. About two years ago, Amazon announced their "Sparrow" picking robot. But that seems to be experimental. It's not seen in videos of Amazon warehouses in 2024. Amazon is using the Agility humanoid, but only experimentally.[1]
This is how Amazon currently does picking.[2] Racks of product come to the picker on robotic platforms. The picking system projects a light square on the space in the rack from which the picker should take the product. The picker picks the item, waves it under a barcode scanner, and drops it in an outgoing bin. Repeat for 8 hours. The job requires no more than a room-temperature IQ. Machines should think. People should work.
Amazon keeps trying to automate that step.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8IdbodRG14
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsIjagFEv84
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