41–50 of 92 posts
I wonder what kind of guardrails (like Three Laws of Robotics) there are to prevent the robots going crazy while executing the prompts
The generally accepted term for the research around this in robotics is Constitutional AI ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073 ) and has been cited/experimented with in several robotics VLAs.
I’m optimistic about humanoid robotics, but I’m curious about the reliability issue. Biological limbs and hands are quite miraculous when you consider that they are able to constantly interact with the world, which entails some natural wear and tear, but then constantly heal themselves.
I think those problems can be solved with further research in material science, no? Combined that with very responsive but low torque servos, I think this is a solvable problem.
Assume every motor has a 1% failure rate per year.
A boring wheeled roomba has 3 motors. That's a 2.9% failure rate per year, and 8.6% failures over 3 years.
Assume a humanoid robot has 43 motors. That gives you a 35% failure rate per year, and 73% over 3 years. That ain't good.
And not only is the humanoid robot less reliable, it's also 14.3x the price - because it's got 14.3x as many motors in it.
[1] And bearings and encoders and gearboxes and control boards and stuff... but they're largely proportional to the number of motors.
These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it. On-device autonomy is the perfect foil to escape centralized authority and accountability. There’s no human behind the drone to charge for war crimes. It’s what they’ve always dreamed of. Who’s going to stop them? Who’s going to say no? The military contracts are too big to say no to, and they might not have a choice. The elimination of toil wil…
> These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it Of course they will. Practically everything useful has a military application. I'm not sure why this is considered a hot take.
What is the model architecture? I'm assuming it's far away from LLMs, but I'm curious about knowing more. Can anyone provide links that describe architectures for VLA?
It's a "visual language action" VLA model "built on the foundations of Gemini 2.0".
As Gemini 2.0 has native language, audio and video support, I suspect it has been adapted to include native "action" data too, perhaps only on output fine-tuning rather than input/output at training stage (given its Gemini 2.0 foundation).
Natively multimodal LLM's are basically brains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think those problems can be solved with further research in material science, no? Combined that with very responsive but low torque servos, I think this is a solvable problem.
It's a simple matter of the number of motors you have. [1] Assume every motor has a 1% failure rate per year. A boring wheeled roomba has 3 motors. That's a 2.9% failure rate per year, and 8.6% failures over 3 years. Assume a humanoid robot has 43 motors. That gives you a 35% failure rate per year, and 73% over 3 years. That ain't good. And not only is the humanoid robot less reliable, it's also 14.3x the price - bec…
What is the model architecture? I'm assuming it's far away from LLMs, but I'm curious about knowing more. Can anyone provide links that describe architectures for VLA?
Actually very close to one I'd say. It's a "visual language action" VLA model "built on the foundations of Gemini 2.0". As Gemini 2.0 has native language, audio and video support, I suspect it has been adapted to include native "action" data too, perhaps only on output fine-tuning rather than input/output at training stage (given its Gemini 2.0 foundation). Natively multimodal LLM's are basically brains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a simple matter of the number of motors you have. [1] Assume every motor has a 1% failure rate per year. A boring wheeled roomba has 3 motors. That's a 2.9% failure rate per year, and 8.6% failures over 3 years. Assume a humanoid robot has 43 motors. That gives you a 35% failure rate per year, and 73% over 3 years. That ain't good. And not only is the humanoid robot less reliable, it's also 14.3x the price - bec…
Would it be possible to reduce the failure rates?
For example, an industrial robot arm with 6 motors achieves much higher reliability than a consumer roomba with 3 motors. They do this with more metal parts, more precision machining, much more generous design tolerances, and suchlike. Which they can afford by charging 100x as much per unit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exciting part comes when two robots are able to do repairs on each other.
I think this is the spooky part. I feel dumb saying it, but is there a point where they are able to coordinate and build a factory to build chips/more of themselves? Or other things entirely?