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Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

electrek.co

331–340 of 416 posts

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#331

I have no knowledge of what kind of logic is used in their FSD code, but I don't see how they can derive much of a motion planning algorithm for a humanoid robot from it. Does a car have to deal with self-collision (accidentally hitting yourself in the face with your hand) or singularities (aka "gimbal lock"/"wrist flip")? Does motion planning for a nonholonomic system like a car easily translate into a holonomic sys…

World perception is what they are solving, control is already mostly solved and can be bought (see Boston Dynamics).

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-argument: I remember seeing a talk by Andrej from a year or two ago and wasn't too impressed - it seemed like they had a huge amount of work left to do and put everything together for a reliable self-driving AI. Everything they showed today, from the vision models to the path planning to labeling to simulation was bleeding edge. And they seem to have managed to put everything together in what appears to be a…

If it's bleeding edge, why does it underperform the competition?

I'm speaking from my knowledge of the specific technologies they are using - it's fairly close to SOTA. I'm not aware of an apples-to-apples comparison of Tesla's autopilot with a similar system from the competition. Most competitors are using LIDARs and/or running their autonomous vehicles in limited geographical regions. IMO, the state space and action space is significantly more constrained in those cases.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#333
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not? Like, how about people who have made major academic or philosophical breakthroughs? Major authors? Even within business, or celebrity, Elon doesn't stick out much other than filling a small niche. The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and a…

The point is they needed to make multiple significant independent breakthroughs in established fields. Turing like a lot of pioneers is seriously overrated. When surrounded by low hanging fruit it’s easy to seemingly make a great deal of progress especially when your credited with formalizing existing ideas or making that one last step into usefulness. Einstein actually pushed boundaries in a well established field w…

Thanks for proving my point. As I said, listing out names just means that people are going to try to say why those people are less impressive.

As for Musk's accomplishments, I don't find them to be very impressive or interesting.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#334
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, there are thousands of tools designed for humans. There are vehicles, ladders, protective suits etc. designed for humans. There are lots of spaces designed for humans in which it needs to move. It makes sense to design the robot so that it is compatible with all these. And there's nothing wrong with human shape, it would be hard to design a better one.

The vehicle thing is exactly what boggles me about this. Are you saying that the humanoid will be driving cars/forklifts/bullsozers? What exactly do you mean that its important that a robot interacting with a vehicle is humanoid?

Yes, in addition to everything else, it could drive vehicles.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#335

At what point are people going to realize Elon is peddling vaporware to keep afloat? What's next? cold fusion?

It's amazing, isn't it? Somehow the dancer in the robot unitard wasn't an "emperor has no clothes" moment, or more aptly a "Nikola pushing a truck down a hill" moment. That's on top of the news that the Cybertruck just got delayed. Again. We're approaching the two year mark of Tesla taking deposits for a product that they don't even have a final design for.

> Somehow the dancer in the robot unitard wasn't an "emperor has no clothes" moment

You can't be serious with this line of thinking.

In case you missed it, here's the key difference between the dancer and the Nikola One being rolled down a hill: The dancer was a silly joke (Elon even said "unlike Dojo, that wasn't real") and Nikola One being rolled down a hill was a phony demonstration. Trevor Milton didn't wrap the video saying, "Haha, just kidding."

You might not resonate with the particular sense of humor that has someone come out and dance, but that's a matter of taste. The fact is, it was intended as a joke.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with Other aspirational goals he has set include a colony of a million people on Mars and a neural lace. I think a humanoid robot is less ambitious than either of these two.

We already have the technology to send people to Mars. We sent people on round trips to the moon 50 years ago, so a one way ticket to Mars now isn't really that hard. What we don't have is cost effective technology to send enough people and equipment for a permanent colony there. But at this point it's really just working on getting cost down (which Musk has done beautifully so far), we have a pretty good idea of how…

"We sent people on round trips to the moon 50 years ago, so a one way ticket to Mars now isn't really that hard."

IDK, man, life support systems for such a long trip are much more demanding than for a jaunt to Moon and back.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#337
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair criticism that Elon Musk would probably agree with. He attempts extraordinarily ambitious things that very few other people would even dream of attempting. Sometimes things take longer and/or perform worse than he hoped they would. Sometimes he succeeds beyond anyone's expectations. In any case, he keeps trying to push the world forward, and that's the highest calling of any engineer in my book. I still c…

>he attempts extraordinary ambitious things that very few other people would even dream of attempting. What are you even talking about? Thousands of people have thought of tackling (1) self driving cars and have made steps towards accomplishing it before musk, (2) reusable rockets, man that has been on the dreams of rocket engineers for decades but we didn't have the computing power to do it, (3) a boring machine...…

Okay, other people dream of attempting these things and Elon Musk actually does attempt them. Is that more clear?

Semantic nitpicking doesn't take anything away from his accomplishments.

If you think Elon Musk or Steve Jobs are just taking credit for other people's work you know absolutely nothing about the history of their companies.

Apple was nearly bankrupt before Steve Jobs took it over, despite having thousands of good engineers working there. It was Jobs' leadership that built into the most valuable company on earth. Other people tried to lead Apple to success and failed miserably. Jobs tried and succeeded beyond what anyone thought was possible. If you think that doesn't matter, or he doesn't deserve massive credit for what he did, you're just confused.

Elon Musk put every penny of his PayPal fortune into SpaceX and Tesla, almost lost it all, all his investors abandoned him, the managers he hired failed him. He was forced to take over leadership of both companies to make them successful, which he did to incredible success.

People like to hate on these guys, to belittle their incredible accomplishments, out of envy, spite, or whatever. The haters fabricate the lie that these guys try to take credit for everything their companies do. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have both praised their teams and collaborators many, many times. There's no way for them to avoid being the face of their companies, but that is in no way evidence of them trying to take all the credit.

But, the fact is that Jobs and Musk are uniquely deserving of credit for each of their companies' successes. They are the most responsible for their success. That doesn't mean they are solely responsible, a fact they were never confused about, have neither has ever said otherwise.

I'm not someone that thinks these guys are at all perfect people, but if you think they're just lucky, or just anyone could have done what they did, you're just extremely ignorant or lying to yourself to protect your own ego.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic. Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to inv…

Musk isn’t actually looking for profitable products. He’s trying to be the king of vaporware. Remember the Cybertruck? Or how he said he could control pigs by putting microchips in their brains? Or how Tesla was all in on Bitcoin until it wasn’t? He probably doesn’t even do it to bump the stock price. It’s probably just about doing whatever will impress Grimes for a little while. Then they both smoke so much weed the…

people can downvote this all they want, but if you’ve ever had a friend who smoked too much weed, or fallen into the habit yourself, you’ve seen the same behavior that Musk exhibits. too many ideas, not enough follow-through, and the ideas tend to be wild and unrealistic —- he’s a textbook case.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#340
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge And yet Elon announced to the world he was going to have the most automated factory in the world, the machine that builds machines, and that the factory was the actual product. People lapped this up. 2 years later they were hand-assembling cars in a tent. Now do you see the problem? > Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about build…

They tried to do something quite crazy with manufacturing and it didn't work. Musk has often ignored industry standard and often it works. In this case it didn't and people will now use this forever to show how stupid he is. However what happened then is that they effectively corrected their mistake, fixed their production, reached their production targets with excellent unit margins. They learned from the episode an…

>They tried to do something quite crazy with manufacturing and it didn't work.

What did they try to do that's "crazy with manufacturing" that hasn't been done by every other car company on the planet?

>fixed their production, reached their production targets

Have their plants ever reached production capacity?

>To the point where Tesla are quite competitive in terms of weight and ease of manufacturing.

And here we have the point. Tesla are competitive, fantastic. That's a long way from all of the early claims about upending the entire manufacturing industry through factory automation the likes of which the world has never seen. Funny how that part of the narrative disappeared.

>They are not doing so bad it seems

Looks to me like legacy car makers are catching up, no?

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