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Open Problems in Robotics

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Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#151

Post by Shared404 »

imtringued wrote: post #36
Shared404 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally do not trust humans. However, we do have inertia with humans running such situations, and until there is something provably/demonstrably better, I don't see the current situation changing.

Trust is a continuum. I don't see how you can say that you do not trust humans at least to some extent, no matter how tiny that sliver of trust is.

A good point. I do of course trust humans to an extent, but as a general rule I feel that it's been beaten into my head by enough experiences to expect for humans to mess something up.

This includes myself of course.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#152

Post by treeman79 »

cptnapalm wrote: post #135
treeman79 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lost binocular vision for a number of years back. You get around just fine without it. Got it back after some speciality glasses (PRISM). Was a complete shock see depth again. Didn’t seem to help anything getting it back. Mostly just trippy. Chairs were amazing to stare at.

From a much shorter and very different route, once after an 18 hour straight Quake marathon, I looked around the my room and was startled at how everything looked. I was highly impressed by the graphics and depth perception.

I took an art class a few years ago. Negative space drawing and perspective drawing will blow your mind after a 3 hour session.

Walking outside you see lines and shadows everywhere. Entire perspective changes.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#153

Post by craftinator »

treeman79 wrote: post #149
etrautmann wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious to hear more. What caused you to lose and then regain depth perception? Were you able to see with both eyes or did you lose vision in one eye temporarily?

Mix of minor strokes and high intercraniel pressure. My vision would switch from one eye to the other roughly every 30 seconds. Mostly seamlessly. Took ages to figure this out. Had some minor left brain issues. So writing would go gibberish every 30 seconds. Keeping a patch on right eye meant my vision went black every 30 seconds but my writing was fine when I could see. Left eye being patched meant writing mostly gi…

This is the most interesting thing I've read today! Thank you for sharing!

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#154

Post by tgflynn »

Animats wrote: post #66

- Motion planning: already discussed. - Multiaxis singularities: much less of a problem than it used to be. We don't need closed-form solutions any more; we have enough CPU power at the robot to deal with this. You need some additional constraint, like "minimize jerk" when you have too many degrees of freedom. - Simultaneous Location and Mapping. SLAM for short: Getting much better. Things which explore and return a…

I don't really understand why depth estimation using binocular vision is still a problem.

I worked on this a bit a number of years ago and I thought I had scene matching working pretty well. The problem is I was trying to make it work without actually having two cameras (ie. on a smartphone where binocular cameras were not available at the time and for the most part still aren't). I was hoping to use the accelerometers and other sensors for dead reckoning the camera's position as the user swept it over a scene, but that turned out to be too hard.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#155

Post by lacker »

thdrdt wrote: post #108
contingencies wrote: post #52

Robotics founder here. Popular conceptions of "robots" are unrealistically general. In industry, we do not build robots, we build automation systems. Given the choice, would you prefer an automation system with some environmental assumptions, high speed and perfect repeatability (ie. entire industrial automation world), or no environmental assumptions, crushingly high cost, slow speed and poor reliability (eg. walkin…

Thinking about car painting robots it's clearly about cost. You can program a car painting robot in some hours. This will be way cheaper than a robot that is aware of the car and knows how it should move to perform the best paint job. Another example is your washing machine. It would be nice to have a washing robot that would sort your clothes and wash them. But it is way cheaper to sort clothes yourself. So a cloth…

I wouldn’t say clothes-sorting is just a nice-to-have - imagine you could get a third machine that sat next to your washer and dryer, and it folded clothes for you. I bet a lot of people would buy one, if it cost a similar amount to a washer or dryer. Lots of money in that hypothetical product. The problem is that our technology isn’t good enough to build it.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#156

Post by tgflynn »

I think one of the problems is that we don't have the right people working on the right problems.

Self-driving cars seem to have absorbed most of the world's high-level robotics efforts for the past decade or more. I was always skeptical of that application because my experience has shown that weak-AI works best when there's a human backup and/or the stakes of an error are not too high. That isn't the case with self-driving cars where a lethal mistake can occur in less than a second.

I think we would be much better off today if much of the self-driving car effort had been focused on household utility robots and/or business applications. No it wouldn't be "saving lives", but it would be saving countless life-hours spent on mind-numbing tasks that are a major reason for why life is so unpleasant for so many people.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#157

Post by alfanick »

tgflynn wrote: post #154
Animats wrote: post #66

- Motion planning: already discussed. - Multiaxis singularities: much less of a problem than it used to be. We don't need closed-form solutions any more; we have enough CPU power at the robot to deal with this. You need some additional constraint, like "minimize jerk" when you have too many degrees of freedom. - Simultaneous Location and Mapping. SLAM for short: Getting much better. Things which explore and return a…

I don't really understand why depth estimation using binocular vision is still a problem. I worked on this a bit a number of years ago and I thought I had scene matching working pretty well. The problem is I was trying to make it work without actually having two cameras (ie. on a smartphone where binocular cameras were not available at the time and for the most part still aren't). I was hoping to use the acceleromete…

Isn't your "that turned out to be too hard" one of the answers?

People tend to think about machine vision in perfect conditions. This is the problem, me thinks. In practice, you will get a lens flare in most important case, or lose a sensor or get some rain.

Instead of designing solutions starting from most hardcore edgecases (which are common with humans), robotics researchers tend to provide MVP that works in best situation. That is far from end-user environmnent.

This needs global fixes, if you (I don't care) want robots working in real world.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#158

Post by smilekzs »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #137
deepGem wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The real problem: solve any of these problems, make very little money" - Just curious why have you come to this conclusion ? Object manipulation has potential products in dishwashing and vegetable chopping - sufficiently large markets, potential billion $ outcomes for a startup which takes the early mover lead. Two robotic hands that can work in co-ordination just as human hands do. Extremely difficult to solve, but…

Robotics and embedded just doesn't make that much money. I had to turn down a job offer due to the seriously low counteroffer I was given. Or rather, I was given no counteroffer, just told to pound sand after the market rate I gave apparently insulted them.

If you count autonomous driving vehicles as robotics (I know it's a stretch), the funding (and therefore pay) story is a lot better, although you get the usual startup vs BigTech debate.

Source: I work in an ADV company.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#159

Post by syntaxing »

I was really into FIRST robotics when I in HS and would love to make something at home. I thought about a VEX kit but didn't really want an erector set like. Does anyone have a recommendation for something like Misty Robotics [1]. I can only think of the Mindstorm but wanted to do some visual AI with it.

[1] https://www.mistyrobotics.com/

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#160

Post by mdorazio »

tgflynn wrote: post #156

I think one of the problems is that we don't have the right people working on the right problems. Self-driving cars seem to have absorbed most of the world's high-level robotics efforts for the past decade or more. I was always skeptical of that application because my experience has shown that weak-AI works best when there's a human backup and/or the stakes of an error are not too high. That isn't the case with self-…

What household tasks do you think are well-suited to robotics that aren't already addressed?

The reason so much focus has gone into autonomous vehicles is because there are trillions of dollars to be made there by the companies that solve it, and many obvious use cases will result in large profits even with imperfect solutions (where "imperfect" means it works only in specific design domains like the southwestern US during the day with no rain).

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