Open Problems in Robotics • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#161

Post by tgflynn » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #160

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…

All of them - cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. Everything that a human needs to do to maintain reasonable living conditions and would hire someone else to do if they were rich.

EDIT: I think that if you could come up with a really good solution for all of that most people would be willing to pay about as much as they do for a car.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#162

Post by aktenlage » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #38

Motion planning is also an Open Problem for Humans! Let's say we are standing on a high hill and I point to another hill and say: "Walk over there". Do you expect any human to find a reasonably good path by themselves? I would personally try to use a map. How do military robots solve this? They use satellite images. And in general, this article seems very pessimistic to me. My home-built computer vision pipeline can…

> Depth estimation: It works well enough in practice. https://www.stereolabs.com/zed-2/

I have no experience with the zed 2, but the zed 1 did not convince me and it had similar fancy marketing visualization as featured by the page you linked.

Don't trust anyone who shows you

- depth estimations from the viewpoint of the camera

- color coded depth estimation

In neither case can you judge the accuracy

Vision-based depth estimation is hard for the general case, where you need to cover a non-tiny depth range to cover, work indoors and outdoors and cannot rely on great texture. All vision-based methods I know of break under circumstances that are not too uncommon for robots.

Laser works much better, but the information density is not that great.

Radar works well in some applications, badly in others.

So I'd consider it "solved" when you throw a very costly combination of sensors on the problem.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#163

Post by tgflynn » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

alfanick wrote: post #157

tgflynn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But what I said was that the "turned out to be too hard" part had nothing to do with binocular vision.

I'm certainly not claiming that I had a fully robust solution but I'm pretty sure lens flares wouldn't be too hard to filter out and there are lots of useful things that need doing in rain-free environments.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#164

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

mvn9 wrote: post #40

tuatoru wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not let them stay in that state for days until you need to ho[o]ver? Risk of personal injury. (The Lego-on-the-stairs scenario.) Also, some people just like a calm visual field at home.

All very reasonable arguments. What I don't understand is cleaning up in the evening. There is no visual field to perceive if you are asleep.

I only use my living room in the evening. When else would I want it tidy?

Well, maybe Saturday morning. But starting the day tidying is not great either.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#165

Post by treeman79 » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #153

treeman79 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Thanks! Took 3 years of hacking mind and body while mentally deficient to figure it all out. Leaned a lot from it all. Kind of forgot a lot too, but got most of it back now.

Would take memory tests daily or more to see how “stupid” I was.

Graphing my own cognitive decline and eventual resurgence was “interesting”

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#166

Post by r34 » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

The only solution to mentioned problems is IMO: we'll have to adapt our environment to the moving machines. At least in early stage, before they will do it autonomously. Language will adapt more by itself (to make machines pass Turing test we need change in language, just as we need change in machines - people will adapt to useful machines)

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#167

Post by stillsut » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

The pile of problems in Robotics reminds me of the challenges faced by computer vision before modern methods were developed. To generalize the issue: humans learn and perform vision and navigational tasks "below" the level of language.

To use a vivid example, you can use language to teach a child how to hold a pencil and write, how to recognize digits, and how to do two digit addition. But there's some cognitive ability "below" the level language a child needs to be capable of in order to take the hints from language and develop the desired skills. In computer vision, we now have something like this in ConvLayers.

In today's robotics we see the hyper-systematization and mathematization of natural concepts like getting an agent to recognize its own bearing. This is what I refer to as "at the level of language", and I think as long as we try to solve these individual navigation problems from mathematical first principles we'll never arrive anywhere near the performance of animal "instinct". We need a new framework that doesn't look like an enumeration of commands within an imperative program.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#168

Post by mediaman » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

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…

Manufacturing company founder here - you are exactly right.

I buy automation equipment.

What I'm looking for is stuff that is relatively easy to program by my team (I do not have the money for tons of engineers to sit around programming arcane stuff), can attain a reasonably good speed, and has the reach and weight capacity I need. And I want economic cost with reasonably good reliability.

Two-handed human-like arms don't interest me. Robots with human-like eyes don't interest me. Safety systems that are too sophisticated/cute/fancy aren't that interesting to me - usually cages or more recently torque sensitive movement is good enough to keep people safe around the robot.

Often the trickiest part is the design of the end of arm tool, not the robot, and I feel this is where most innovation could happen that would benefit my operations.

By the way, the above is why Rethink Robotics failed and Universal Robots (which got way less press coverage, and raised less money, and had a non-celebrity founder) was wildly successful. Universal built a co-bot with a single arm that was fast (enough) and could carry enough weight. It didn't look human at all. Rethink had an LCD panel with eyes on it and two arms and a sonar person presence detector and its animated eyes would look at nearby people to indicate it was aware of them. But it was slow and not as accurate. Universal Robots made the product manufacturers actually wanted.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#169

Post by Animats » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

deepGem wrote: post #77

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…

"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…

Two robotic hands that can work in co-ordination just as human hands do.

Rethink Robotics, a Rod Brooks startup, tried that, with "Baxter". Company went bust.

There's good, simple commercial hardware for high-volume vegetable chopping and dishwashing, and it can be found in most large commercial kitchens.

There's a huge amount of special purpose machinery in the world. Most of it is pretty dumb. Newer machinery tends to have more sensors and a bit of self-adjustment. Vision systems have become parts of much industrial machinery - they're cheap now. Mostly they're looking for things aligning or looking like a known good object.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#170

Post by 317070 » Wed, Aug 19, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

deepGem wrote: post #77

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…

"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…

> Two robotic hands that can work in co-ordination just as human hands do. Extremely difficult to solve, but money is there.

You will find the most automated Mc Donalds in the world in Switzerland. Mc Donalds over there has a lot more automation there than it does in the US, both in the cooking and in the order taking.

Either this is because the automation is extremely difficult to do, but is simpler in Switzerland. Or alternatively, this is because in most countries in the world humans are cheaper than the automated system, even after it has already been developed.

As someone who does research on robotics for a living. The problem is not the former, but the latter.