An electric new era for Atlas(bostondynamics.com) |
An electric new era for Atlas(bostondynamics.com) |
Their hardware is second to none.
FML, that's dark.
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
1. Amazing technical ability.
2. Feels scary, both the beyond-human movement, and the design of the 'face'.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...
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!
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.
FSD is based on neural net so is Optimus vision
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
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?
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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?
You say this like it's a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* which definitely requires human level general AI at fairly low electrical power demand
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.
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-...
I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.
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.
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.
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
Spoiler alert: dis-arm.
"Understood, now de-livering John."
But it was always going to be Skynet.
I bet the next version will have teeth.
Mostly wheels just seem like a better idea. For rough terrain, why not just fly ?
Weight
(You need way more energy to do anything)
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
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.
Of course this is not directly comparable, but I think robotics is harder and more less open to brute force approaches.
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://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.
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://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
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.
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.
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=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?
This is going to haunt my dreams.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
An oldie but a goodie, heres one of my favorite displays of how "ahead of the curve" Tesla is:
BACKFLIPS.
When do we want them?
[backflips]
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...
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...
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.
This is one of those 80/20 things that is just glaringly obvious. Like lvl 5 autonomous cars vs lvl 3-4.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Group since December 2020, but having only completed the acquisition in June 2021.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 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:
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