I’m picturing a waking digger for specialized terrain. I think Hyundai/BD combo has a chance to do it safely. Maybe something small like a Kubota.
https://kubota.ca/en/products/power-equipment/excavators/k00...
Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
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Re: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robots already build cars, and supply of new cars is often out-stripped by demand. It's not really new ground. The limitations in car production are always the component supply chain, not the actual manufacture.
Google image search "car factory" and it's super obviously it's quite labour intensive. I'm not sure why an investment in robots has to be "new ground".
Humans do the basic stuff that robots aren't any good at: pulling wires through, putting some pieces in an inconvenient place,etc. All the welding, painting and many others are fully automated.
Re: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
#143They've gone from Google -> Softbank -> Hyundai in a few years. Does anyone know where their revenue is coming from currently? For all the flashy videos they put out, you so rarely see them that I'm not sure if they're just doing well on the B2B side (warehouse automation? military contracts?), or if they've been in the red for the last decade.
This and the first few replies to it feel like they're coming from bean counters, not engineers. Who reads HN? I mean anyone can, but who's the core audience. I'm confused. Shouldn't the top voted thread be about the tech and the engineering behind it, and debating whether it's worth funding or not based on that, not based on things that are mostly the concern of business people. Is it that most engineers today have…
I'm more just shocked that they're valued at 1B and are still doing their thing without a clear path to a sellable product. It's great and something I'd like to see more of, but we're long past the days when companies would spend a lot of money on long-term research projects.
Re: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This made me think of something I hadn't considered before - whether we'll first see automated driving, but only when the vehicle is empty. e.g., you drive yourself somewhere, then the vehicle moves on to another job. If the vehicle is privately owned, it would park or drive home for your wife to use. If part of a fleet, it would just drive on to the next request. Cars in that mode could be constrained to a less dang…
> I don't want to drive to work at 20km/h, but once I'm out of the car, I don't really care how slowly it goes. The other people on the road trying to get to work probably do.
There are other options. They could take surface roads instead of highways. Or they could potentially use the emergency lane if there's some kind of communication standard to let them know when to get out of the emergency lane.
Re: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
#145And a fricking messenger app sold for $21.8 billion. Unbelievable.
Believe the numbers, with more numbers:
Comparing numerically, the revenue generated from ($21.8b) WhatsApp is higher than from Boston Dynamics ($880M).
For 2020 WhatsApp approximately == $5.5b (Forbes https://www.businessofapps.com/data/whatsapp-statistics/)
For 2020 Boston Dynamics == $53m (GrowJo https://growjo.com/company/Boston_Dynamics)
Re: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans spend 15h to 60h of labour to build a car. After, humans worked on individual parts, shipping, loading etc. My rule of thumb is that there is about 10% of manufacture cost that are direct or indirect cost connected to payroll. If I may add another axis of reflexion that I consider fundamental for modern engineers to consider, food for machines for producing a car (44% natural gas when smithing things) is about…
Even 60h seems low here. Do you only mean assembly? Tacking on parts manufacturing, sub-component assembly, and software is likely to increase that estimate by a factor of 2 to 5.
The numbers are coming from Toyota, Peugeot and Renault.
You can take the financials - manufacturing payroll is its own category.