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It is opensource but still costs nearly 25k dollar. why is it that expensive ?
The software is open source. The hardware is proprietary and protected by patents.
I'd love to see this be usable as potentially a mower and or vacuum/mop with different swappable components.
Make it micro. I want mini robots cleaning dust and debris, silently and out of my way. I don’t want macro bots getting in my way
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make it micro. I want mini robots cleaning dust and debris, silently and out of my way. I don’t want macro bots getting in my way
I agree, micro bots would be best to handle the dirty jobs.
I'd love to see this be usable as potentially a mower and or vacuum/mop with different swappable components.
Laundry, cooking, dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, and other constantly recurring tasks are what I would love to see automated not just a “robot that sweeps” like the market has been trying to sell me.
Ever since I read the second shift book about the unpaid extra 40 hour week women work doing domestic tasks I’ve dreamed of robots replacing that for humanity. It’s a massive cost to people individually and humanity overall, and kind of a silent epidemic.
It’s crazy but freeing up half of humanity from the drudge work of daily chores is one of the most obvious disruptive technology plays. I rarely hear people put the robot revolution in this context, but I very much think we should start doing so.
Here’s a good overview for the uninitiated:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/unequal-division-la...
It is opensource but still costs nearly 25k dollar. why is it that expensive ?
Labor isn't free. Building custom PCBs and hardware in low quantity isn't cheap. Building, calibrating, and testing robots isn't cheap.
It is opensource but still costs nearly 25k dollar. why is it that expensive ?
The failures analysis is super well done, nice work! Curious what qualifies as hardware failure, e.g. there's 5 trials where the "Realsense gave bad depth", and how that's determined.
That's very cool. I have almost no experience with robotics, so excuse the silly questions: - How does it know what objects are? Does it use some sort of realtime object classifier neural net? What limitations are there here? - Does the robot know when it can't perform a request? I.e. if you ask it to move a large box or very heavy kettlebell? - How well does it do if the object is hidden or obscured? Does it go look…
You basically hit the nail on the head with these questions. This work is super cool, but you named a lot of the limitations with contemporary robot learning systems.
1. It's using an object classifier. It's described here (https://github.com/ok-robot/ok-robot/tree/main/ok-robot-navi...), but if I understanding it correctly basically they are using a ViT model (basically an image classification model) to do some labeling of images and projecting them onto a voxel grid. Then they are using language embeddings from CLIP to pair the language with the voxel grid. The limitations of this are that if they want this to run on the robot, they can't use the super huge versions of these models. While they could use a huge model on the cloud, that would introduce a lot of latency.
2. It almost certainly cannot identify invalid requests. There may be requests that are not covered by their language embeddings, in which case the robot would maybe do nothing. But it doesn't appear that this system has any knowledge of physics, other than the hardware limitations of the physical controller.
3. Hidden? Almost certainly wouldn't work. The voxel labeling relies on a module that labels the voxels and without visual info, it can't label them. Also, as far as I can tell, it doesn't appear to have very complex higher-order reasoning about, say, that a fork is in a drawer, which is in a kitchen, which is often in the back of a house. Partially obscured? That would be subject to the limitations of the visual classifier, so it might work. ViT is very good, but it probably depends on how obscured the object is.
I'd love to see this be usable as potentially a mower and or vacuum/mop with different swappable components.
Not to counterpoint, but just for the sake of discussion, i kind of want the opposite but for maybe similar reasons. I want flexible robots that can replace my human labor. I don’t want specialist robots that are obligate specialists. Laundry, cooking, dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, and other constantly recurring tasks are what I would love to see automated not just a “robot that sweeps” like the market has been trying…
But I worry very much that tools like this will be used primarily to increase corporate profits and reduce money spent on humans, rather than remove drudgery from people’s lives and allow them to do things more aligned with their goals and natures.
E.g., if we make a cleaning robot, hotels will replace half their staff — what will these people do for a living? Work in an AI sweatshop, categorizing images of child abuse?
Old-school science fiction often proposed that we’d be entering a new age of art and leisure, as robots and AI take over menial tasks. In fact today I think we’re seeing AI and robots — in part — taking jobs from humans, and in order to provide entertainment and economic leverage to richer humans.
It’s making me reevaluate all that old science fiction, as it seemed to require an invisible 90% of the population basically working for the AIs so that the AIs can curate a great life for a stratospherically-wealthy minority.
It is opensource but still costs nearly 25k dollar. why is it that expensive ?