Open Problems in Robotics

That isn't the case though. Gm and Google both tell you that their incidents per mile (I think they use 100000 miles or something) is constant, because as they get better they test in harder situations. A automatic car on a desert freeway (no traffic) is easy compared to freezing rain during the afternoon rush hour in Minneapolis. (afternoon implying most people were out and so the decision to stay home isn't available). That is just on hard situation that comes to mind, I think those doing self driving cars know of others.

Force can also be transmitted with belts, cables etc, like tendons. Then you don't need necessarily need a motor in each joint.

I work in robotics. The problem for pretty much everything is one of scale and commercialization. Every one of these issues has been addressed, but almost none have a good and bundled solution.

It feels like computers in the 70s. All the pieces are there but there aren't mass produced PCs yet somewhat because there aren't the suppliers to make things easier.

This is changing fast.

For example, SLAM has many things that work, but they require fine tuning, and most contain undocumented features that require reading the source to find. Slamcore is a company working on this, I hope there are more.

Teleportation was "possible but hard", but Freedom Robotics has a good solution now that mostly "just works"

Robotic bases work well, but they will ship them to you without things plugged in so you have to find the issue and fix it yourself. AWS Deepracer is clearly a prototype for a solid wheeled base. The documentation and build quality is an order of magnitude higher than anything else in the space. My guess is they launch it as a useful base in the next year or so.

Depth estimation is pretty good with Intel Realsense now, and the new OpenCV OAK is another attempt here. I think this is more solved and packaged than anything else.

ROS2 was only properly released in June 2020, and it is a huge step up from ROS1 for commercial applications. It probably needs another 1-2 years for the community to finalize supporting it.

I think for founders finding known robotic solutions and making them into robust commercial products is a great space to work in.

The next few years are very interesting in this space, as even 1 year ago everything was much harder and it's rapidly getting easier.

Everything listed in this article is framed as a software problem, but the beauty of robotics is that many problems can fall to either software, hardware, or electrical solutions.

Without further ado, a very incomplete list of hardware and electrical innovations that would push robotics forward.

- Cheaper and smaller low-backlash actuators. Motors and associated gearboxes are big, heavy, and expensive, which is a big part of why our robots have singularities in their designs, making the motion planning problem more difficult.

- Actuators with good force-speed curves. Muscles have both great torque at zero speed and great speed at zero torque. (weight lifting and throwing a baseball). Only hydraulics come close to matching both numbers, and they're heavy, expensive, and tend to leak oil on the carpet.

- Cheaper force/torque sensors. Most robots today don't even have torque sensing on all their actuators, let alone the sort of dense 6dof-sensing full-body surfaces that animal skin provides.

- Across-the-board robustness improvements. Robots more mechanically complicated than a quadcopter tend to break a lot. This makes approaches like training ML models directly on hardware difficult.

- Reliably low-latency wireless. There's been a lot of hype about cloud robotics, and there's a lot of potential in offboard sensing, but we need a cheap communication system that can deliver - Cheap and light lidars: true depth sensing with long range that works outside means a lot of hard computer vision problems get easier, and means your robot can be smaller since it needs fewer cameras

The thing I love about working in robotics is that we don't need to solve all the software problems and all the hardware problems to make a system that works well in the real world. We get to pick and choose which is easier, and often the solutions in software space depend intimately on the kind of substrate they need to run on.

> Teleportation was "possible but hard", but Freedom Robotics has a good solution now that mostly "just works"

For somebody not in robotics, what does "teleportation" mean in this context. I assume that it doesn't mean the Star Trek style beaming that comes up from a Google search.