I'm interested to get the opinion of others in the area, what are the biggest challenges to building robots that can be part of our daily lives?
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#2I'd say that there are two categories of reasons.
First, the iteration cycle is much longer than for software.
Second, Moravec's Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Both of these make robotics really expensive to research and develop.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#3I'd say that there are two categories of reasons. First, the iteration cycle is much longer than for software. Second, Moravec's Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Both of these make robotics really expensive to research and develop.
> Moravec wrote in 1988: it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests
That is just plain AI hubris, performing well on intelligence tests isn't easy even today unless you pick a very specific kind of intelligence test. It costs millions of dollars of computation just to make the AI play a simple game like starcraft or dota reasonably well with the methods we have today, the real world is way more complex than those games and will get way more expensive.
In simple lab or factory environments he is right though, there the reasoning can be implemented with a simple maze solver or inverse kinematics or similar so basically free.
But still, his paradox no longer applies today. Object detection is already good enough for robots, the problem is the reasoning required to actually navigate around those objects, not detecting them. For example, Uber detected the woman they ran over and killed, but their navigation algorithm assumed it wasn't an important object so just ran her over. The hard part was the reasoning, not the vision.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#4Robots like order and predictability. As engineers we try to design robots to meet certain needs. Real life is messy.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#5I'd say that there are two categories of reasons. First, the iteration cycle is much longer than for software. Second, Moravec's Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Both of these make robotics really expensive to research and develop.
> Moravec wrote in 1988: it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests That is just plain AI hubris, performing well on intelligence tests isn't easy even today unless you pick a very specific kind of intelligence test. It costs millions of dollars of computation just to make the AI play a simple game like starcraft or dota reasonably well with the methods we have to…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#6I'd say that there are two categories of reasons. First, the iteration cycle is much longer than for software. Second, Moravec's Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Both of these make robotics really expensive to research and develop.
I came to the same conclusion - the cost/progress ratio is still pretty high for the field.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#7Mass production now has the price of an embedded computer down to $4 in the case of the Raspberry Pi Pico, however the prices of motors, sensors, and hardware aren't subject to Moore's law in the same way. This means that to personally experiment with robots, you have to spend a boatload of money. Building a robot arm, for example, requires about 8 axis of motion, force feedback, and a fair bit math to even pick up an object and move it to a new location.
The software for robots doesn't really do imitation, or AGI style learning, so you need programming to get it to perform any given task.
We're in robotics about the same place personal computing was in 1975. Some people have made interesting things, but there's only a few commodity systems that work and no real killer application that would deliver real value in the home.
Sure, Boston Dynamics is interesting, but $75000 for Spot is way more than the $500 IMSAI inflation adjusted to about $2500.
Less hackers have access to them, less companies can afford to experiment with them... prices still need to drop a few more orders of magnitude.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#8Mass production now has the price of an embedded computer down to $4 in the case of the Raspberry Pi Pico, however the prices of motors, sensors, and hardware aren't subject to Moore's law in the same way. This means that to personally experiment with robots, you have to spend a boatload of money. Building a robot arm, for example, requires about 8 axis of motion, force feedback, and a fair bit math to even pick up a…
This is great, thanks for sharing. So you think it's more hardware than software that is holding back progression?
I figured that the hardware for many applications robots could do is already there, both in terms of price and technical feasibility. For example, robot vacuuming, material handling, basic manipulation, some social interactions, delivery, etc.
But we still don't see them every day, leading me to think it is the cost of software development that is the main blocker.
But you make a great point. How much innovation could happen if anyone could play around with a robot in their spare time...
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to build robots?
#9I'd say that there are two categories of reasons. First, the iteration cycle is much longer than for software. Second, Moravec's Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Both of these make robotics really expensive to research and develop.
"The electronics and the mechanics and the fabrication took me a year. Then it took me an afternoon to program the computer to actually activate it"