Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 246 posts

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#31

Post by FactKnower69 »

wokwokwok wrote: post #27
quantified wrote: post #2

Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.

I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea? If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot... I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does. ...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech. I guess. As long as you don't use i…

>but is it that bad of an idea?

yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#32

Post by chollida1 »

That event was a huge disappointment. It's clear that Elon didn't consider it to be that important and didn't put any real effort into it.

There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.

And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#33

Post by slimebot80 »

It's all about controlling money that might go to more honest ventures.

Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.

And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#34

Post by stackghost »

dullcrisp wrote: post #21
stackghost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift. We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene". Incredible

I don’t think the person you’re replying to said anything about Elon Musk in this case

Not directly, but he and Tesla are unfortunately inextricably linked.

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#35

Post by sterlind »

jvanderbot wrote: post #10
ethagknight wrote: post #4

To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation. (doing it safely in a room with guests, unguided... thats another matter). The physical limitations and packaging are a big challenge, and I dont think I saw Optimus lift anything remotely heavy.. just pull a beer tap.. a decision that probably speaks volumes about current limits of the technology. To apply my first point to…

I've worked in robotics for over 10 years, at state of the art labs and high quality startups. There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding. Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while. Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.

That surprises me. I thought motion planning and motor control would be harder - old memories of Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs, the clunkiness of a robot aligning itself perfectly with a drawer before executing a scripted-looking action to pull the handle, the obvious recorded sequence Atlas uses to get up from a fall. I know Boston Dynamics does impressive acrobatics, but it's all legs and no arms.

Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#36

Post by darth_avocado »

wokwokwok wrote: post #27
quantified wrote: post #2

Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.

I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea? If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot... I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does. ...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech. I guess. As long as you don't use i…

> Is it that bad of an idea?

Driving at 60mph with shaky internet connection? Absolutely.

Piloting a robot to fold laundry? Maybe not.

Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#37

Post by mysteria »

Terr_ wrote: post #19
mysteria wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine latency would be an issue if companies were considering teleoperation using staff in a country with cheaper labor. For example I work with people in India and China and they regularly complain about the several hundred ms of latency they get when using their American VDIs. That off the shelf lawn mower is going to be hard to control safely with all that delay, and there's also the risk of connection d…

Let's see, New York to Mumbai over the Earth's surface is maybe 12,500 km, assume a direct fiber optic cable where light travels noticeably slower than in a vacuum at 200,000 km per second... So a minimum of 62.5 ms one way with the best terrestrial equipment. While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with…

Realistically it's in the several hundred range. I just did a ping using Vultr's Looking Glass from New Jersey to Mumbai and got around ~240ms on commercial fiber. For people working from home in India (with cable/DSL overhead + distance from the IX) connected to servers in LA I regularly see 300-400ms.

Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#38

Post by vardump »

I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that.

The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#39

Post by consumer451 »

What does everyone think about 1X's NEO? [0] They began from the idea of compliant robotics,[1] which seems to me to be a requirement for safe operation in proximity to humans.

Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrLuUxv9gE (also remote controlled for now, while being trained)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6LMPXRdVc

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_robotics

Re: Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

#40

Post by ratedgene »

vardump wrote: post #38

I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that. The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).

But they did try to hide it. It's in some videos where one of them was trying not to admit they were remotely controlled and that "probably some AI is used"
Post reply on HN