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Actually, I won't be surprised if it turns out that the 40 or so cybercabs were remote-controlled too.
Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.
Teslas also do it, and truly necessary interventions are rare these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.
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 happen to know a senior person at a autonomous delivery robot company, which employs a team of people for just this purpose, because even delivering pizzas around a college town in a small little robot needs this. For things like (actual example for them) a sofa that was being thrown away and was just left on the sidewalk, and so a human needed to confirm that it was safe to move around it. And so far as I'm aware, Tesla isn't doing this, which is why I think that their autonomous taxi idea is nonsense.
1: Personal experience from being driven in a Waymo, I hit the assist button when we got stuck by some double parked cars in a parking lot. By the time someone answered the car had already extricated itself, but it didn't start that until after I hit the button.
How is stuff like this not considered fraud? This seems much worse to me than Musk's usual Tesla lies in which he is predicting some future capability. At least there is an argument that Musk believed it those at the time he said them or that they were optimistically possible despite being impractical. This seems to be material misrepresentation of the viability of one of the company's core R&D projects that Musk cla…
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.
Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.
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 be…
Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures. The only danger would be if one fell over. 1x NEO looks awesome and far more advanced than this version of Optimus. I'm bullish on 1x. Tesla has a manufacturing advantage though. There were 50 units of Optimus at the event and I expect that there are only a few fully working units of NEO made so far. Also,…
How is stuff like this not considered fraud? This seems much worse to me than Musk's usual Tesla lies in which he is predicting some future capability. At least there is an argument that Musk believed it those at the time he said them or that they were optimistically possible despite being impractical. This seems to be material misrepresentation of the viability of one of the company's core R&D projects that Musk cla…
Quite a few people at the event asked employees about this and were directly given the answer. It wasn't a secret.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
IIRC, that wasn't a control problem but a mechanical failure of a gearmotor shaft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm also a roboticist. Perception and funding are hard. But don't forget battery energy density, and the power-to-weight ratio and energy efficiency of actuators. Also very very hard, and Moore's law helps not at all. Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making. Hu…