This is rad. I would totally buy a 25k robot if I could train it to fold and put away my laundry (serious)
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Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
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Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#32It is opensource but still costs nearly 25k dollar. why is it that expensive ?
Where’s the price? Do you have a link to the product page?
Thank you
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#33[dead]
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#34That'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…
Disclaimer: I'm not one of the authors, but I work in this area. 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…
The cool thing is that there are solutions to all of these problems, if the more basic problems can be solved more reliably to prove the underlying technology works.
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#35It is opensource but still costs nearly 25k dollar. why is it that expensive ?
Since when does open source mean cheap? Labor isn't free. Building custom PCBs and hardware in low quantity isn't cheap. Building, calibrating, and testing robots isn't cheap.
Now in all fairness, open source tends to mean cheaper because it does reduce how much has to be invented in-house, and also (sometimes) because it lets you crowd source free labor. In software, that can lead to stuff getting completely built for free (or close) because the base costs are low and mostly consist of labor that some people might be willing to do for free. In hardware, it's likely that open source still reduces the costs, but... you can make a thousand copies of a library for free; making a thousand copies of a part is never going to be free.
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#36[deleted]
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I applaud — for real — your ideas and feelings here. I’ve had similar thoughts my whole life, growing up reading golden age science fiction. 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 ro…
I don't think you should reevaluate it in that context. Golden age science fiction assumed what we seem to be now calling AGI and still don't know how to create. What we're now calling artificial intelligence (thanks to OpenAI) is effectively an advanced version of autocomplete with infinite computing power behind it. It's incredibly inefficient, and if we ever build AGI we'll look back at AI like people looking back at the earliest manual typewriters without shift keys or lowercase.
For golden age sci fi theories of human work vs leisure to actually take hold, we need universal basic income, or some other monetary theory that allows us to value other people for being alive rather than solely for being feudal slaves of deranged billionaires.
"Hotel maid" as a job really shouldn't exist when robots can do it better and more consistently (which isn't true yet). At that point, not before, should be considered beneath human dignity. But we definitely need an answer for what happens to the newly undignified human.
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#38This is remarkable and could be life changing for the disabled, elderly, gamers, or profoundly lazy and their caretakers.
I forgot where I saw that, but generally, improving things for people with disabilities improves things for everyone, like making sidewalks wheelchair friendly helps parents with a stroller, or people carrying heavy stuff, walking with a cane, young children on bicycles, people who can't see well...
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#39I know nothing about robotics, but can someone ELI5 why the robot makes so many extraneous movements? E.g. the video that shows it moving Takis from the desk to the nightstand, it approaches the desk, and then the arm mechanism moves all the way down (an unnecessary maneuver), then rises again before reaching the level needed to pick up the Takis.
Re: Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
#40I'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…
I agree that generalist robots would be better, but building them is really hard (which we know, because we've been trying to build them for decades now). So I think piecemeal robots are the happy-enough medium that we can build to start automating away work today (while we hopefully keep working on the general case).