21–30 of 98 posts
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obviously there's more to the kinematics than making the legs longer, but can't they just make the legs longer for it to be taller?
Longer legs means more inertia on the actuators, which means bigger actuators + bigger battery, which means heavier robot, which means...
I love the idea of humaniod robot and commercially available. I like to think of such expensive things as an investment rather than a toy if I have to buy. Question is what are some good use cases that can be solved with such a humanoid robot ?
Personally, I think the first real use cases will mostly be entertainment. Humanoids have a high "coolness" factor. Also, I think there's a long tail of random problems which you don't want to buy a new robot to solve, but which, if you have a robot lying around that isn't perfect but is "good enough", might be possible to solve imperfectly. For example, I just had a newborn baby, and I was thinking it would be nice if I had a static arm that could hold his bottle for me. There's a lot of tail end problems like that in your day to day life. But I think the really interesting capabilities will come once there's very good end-to-end models running on-device.
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We do! https://bounties.kscale.dev/ We haven't updated it much but it's a good starter point
Amazing, pretty nice list! Two quick suggestions: a) some of these definitely look they could be done without hardware or with light hardware support from a staff member? b) if you do a) and are open source completely I bet you don’t even need to do bounties. The increased participation could mean some great community generated solutions quick.
I have some technical questions about feet. Human feet have metatarsophalangeal joints connecting the toes to the rest of the foot. But humanoid robots don't have these (at least, the vast majority don't). Why? These joints are very useful. Also, the bottom of the human foot is soft and has thousands of nerve endings. Can we really expect robots to get anywhere near human mobility performance without this level of co…
For walking, the most important thing is that the robot can be simulated well, so in our case, we tried to model the foot contact with the ground in simulation quite accurately. In fact, we found that force sensors in the foot probably help but they're not necessary in simulation, and we wanted to shave off anything that wasn't necessary. I am not sure how close we will get to human mobility - it's definitely a learning process - but you can get much further in simulation than you'd expect.
Congratulations! This looks really great. What've you found to be the best hands / end effectors these days? When do you think we'll have good, reliable 5 finger hands that are ~reasonably priced?
I'm not convinced that 5 finger hands are necessary right now, but there is a really long tail of hand suppliers that we've been exploring to help get the price down. I think at volume the price for a good set of hands should settle somewhere around $300-500. Most of it comes down to meeting suppliers where they're at and negotiating mutually beneficial deals. It's not magic but it does require having a good understa…
I have some technical questions about feet. Human feet have metatarsophalangeal joints connecting the toes to the rest of the foot. But humanoid robots don't have these (at least, the vast majority don't). Why? These joints are very useful. Also, the bottom of the human foot is soft and has thousands of nerve endings. Can we really expect robots to get anywhere near human mobility performance without this level of co…
In general, I think the best way to think about the differences between human muscles and robot actuators is that human muscles are simultaneously incredible in terms of strength and power density, and also incredibly fragile. Robot actuators are fairly robust, but comparatively poor. Humans are essentially falling apart at all times, but the repair mechanisms in the body do a good enough job that it doesn't matter (although you probably know someone with a "career-disruptive/ending" sports-related injury that shows these mechanisms have limits). Robotics is a long way away from making actuators that can be fixed online in such a process. Even cable stretching in cable-driven mechanisms remains hard to handle effectively, and that's one of the simplest types of mechanism wear.
I'm not super active in the humanoid robot space anymore, however I did my PhD about 9 years ago in HRI. That was the time of Boston Dynamics, DARPA robotics challenge, and Aldebaran's Pepper and Nao robots.
You mentioned you are building everything open source. What happened with ROS and related projects? Do you build on top of that, or is that all super outdated that a reboot was needed?
Another question I have is: why are you choosing a two-legged human over a four-legged one?
My experiments with two legged robots were mostly bad. Not only did they fall basically all the time but they also had a big drift. So far, I have not seen any large improvements. But again, I might be very outdated.
I always said to my colleagues. The main point stopping robots from picking up is a stable platform. And with the platform I mean walking.
Seems like the thing is entirely manufactured and mostly designed by a Chinese company? https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/V_WVFSJg3cTPq0Y4gK4cHw
Any robotics company that is not thinking about manufacturing from day 1 is not a serious robotics company.
Seems like the thing is entirely manufactured and mostly designed by a Chinese company? https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/V_WVFSJg3cTPq0Y4gK4cHw