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Open Problems in Robotics

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Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#201

Post by Symmetry »

contingencies wrote: post #186
Symmetry wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are happy middle grounds which are neither the rote repetition of industrial production nor the impossibly unstructured environments a theoretical butler robot would have to work in. I work piece picking and, with a succession of unknown objects to pick up and place, the problem is both interesting and achievable.

Almost all picking is done with pneumatic suction because it's highly reliable, powerful, relatively safe and easily adaptable. Furthermore, the standard silicone nozzles on the market permit varying amounts of safety margin due to squishiness. You can solve for almost every real world picking problem without more custom hardware than perhaps a mounting plate and scale instantly to mass-produced parallelism. This is…

We've generally found that the situation is a lot more complicated than that, especially on the warehouse integration side.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#202

Post by contingencies »

Symmetry wrote: post #201
contingencies wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all picking is done with pneumatic suction because it's highly reliable, powerful, relatively safe and easily adaptable. Furthermore, the standard silicone nozzles on the market permit varying amounts of safety margin due to squishiness. You can solve for almost every real world picking problem without more custom hardware than perhaps a mounting plate and scale instantly to mass-produced parallelism. This is…

We've generally found that the situation is a lot more complicated than that, especially on the warehouse integration side.

Can you fill us in a bit more on what you mean by picking-specific warehouse integration challenges?

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#203

Post by Symmetry »

contingencies wrote: post #202
Symmetry wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've generally found that the situation is a lot more complicated than that, especially on the warehouse integration side.

Can you fill us in a bit more on what you mean by picking-specific warehouse integration challenges?

Basically a customer isn't going to be willing to make large changes in their process when they're demoing your system.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#204

Post by roland35 »

bluGill wrote: post #120
thdrdt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A robot that is aware of the car is long term better because you don't have to spend hours programming for each car and paint scheme. However the problem is hard enough that right now we spend hours because it works and industrial automation has enough advantages that it is worth doing anyway.

That robot may be more valuable in a company that makes custom items like toys or signage. For car manufacturing, they are making hundreds of thousands of cars a year of the same exact shape, so a few hours if setup isn't to bad!

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#205

Post by bluGill »

roland35 wrote: post #204
bluGill wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A robot that is aware of the car is long term better because you don't have to spend hours programming for each car and paint scheme. However the problem is hard enough that right now we spend hours because it works and industrial automation has enough advantages that it is worth doing anyway.

That robot may be more valuable in a company that makes custom items like toys or signage. For car manufacturing, they are making hundreds of thousands of cars a year of the same exact shape, so a few hours if setup isn't to bad!

A few setup for cars adds up, which is why cars are a single color. If the robot had some artistic sense it could put stripes on the car that artfully flows with the lines of the car. No reason it can't be done today, but it isn't because that is more hours.

I believe most car parts are paint everything and don't worry about over spray which brings costs down. That only works if you have a single color.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#206

Post by bluGill »

robotresearcher wrote: post #147
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…

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

Human costs are complex. I used to work in a company that made tape robots. One customer did the math, hiring humans to change tapes was cheaper than buying a robot. Then he walked in one night and saw the kids in hockey gear, take the needed tape off the shelf, slap shot it to the "goalie" who put it in the drive. Which is why he was a customer even though human labor is cheaper.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#207

Post by bluGill »

jandrese wrote: post #177
Animats wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of money that's gone into that area without shipping a product is insane.

The potential upside for the company that gets it right is enormous. Billions of people are tired of wasting their time driving. Entire industries can be built on the technology if it works well. That said it's a problem that steers awfully close to needing a full real AI and that's been a showstopper for loads of potential solutions for decades now.

In some cases you need to invest as risk mitigation. If someone else does self driving cars and proves that it is safer than human driven cars by a large margin yiy might find yourself out of the car business when governments mandate the technology and you can't afford the license.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#208

Post by bluGill »

dorgo wrote: post #179
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…

Given the choice, would you prefer an automation system with some environmental assumptions, high speed and perfect repeatability, or less environmental assumptions, slightly higher cost, slower speed and poorer reliability?

Depends on what it does. A robot that drives my kids to school has different constraints from a robot that cleans my kitchen after I'm done. The latter can be made safe by putting a locked door on the kitchen (which in turn means open floor plans are out). But the kitchen robot it allowed to take hours (not days) to do what I can handle in a few minutes. The get my kid to school robot needs to have speed.

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#209

Post by kleiba »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #91
alwahi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry for sidetracking your answer but what actually does convex mean in the context of optimization. I remember looking at a book called convex optimization. Your statement that > Motion planning is very much non-convex, suggests to me that you are very much talking about the same thing. I understand convexity as in a shape. Why is convex good and concave bad in terms of optimization? I don't want you to dumb down t…

Convex/ non-convex optimisation refers to the shape of the error function we're trying to optimise. In convex optimisation we can assume it's, well, convex: . . ε \ / \ / \ / \ / '._ _.' ^ Global optimum In non-convex optimisation we can't make any assumption about the shape of the error function: ,--. .--. ε / \ / \ ,--. / \ / \ / \ / .' \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / `--' \ / `--' ^ \ / ^ | `--' | | ^ | | | | | | | `-----…

Beautiful ASCII graphs!

Re: Open Problems in Robotics

#210

Post by snovv_crash »

m0zg wrote: post #176
b3kart wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two counterpoints here: 1) Humans can estimate their own uncertainty. Ask a person to show how long a meter is, and they'll give you an estimate. Then ask them to show you the "error bounds", i.e. what they're "quite certain" the meter is longer than and shorter than. You are likely to get sensible bounds. Now, humans aren't amazing at this, but the brain does have capacity for estimating how uncertain it is. 2) No,…

Ask a programmer to estimate how long it'll take them to code something to see if we really have error bars on complex functions. The margin will be so wide as to be completely useless. We do have error bars on simple measurements already. They're right there in the data sheet for the sensor. What you're asking for are error bars on things several levels distant in the layers of abstraction. Humans suck at that. We o…

Programmers can give you good error bounds. Ask what the best and worst case is for solving a problem, and 80% of the time they will be within those bounds.

The problem is that management doesn't want to hear about the worst case, because it looks bad for them politically.

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