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Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

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Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#41

Post by jeffbee »

cyberax wrote: post #37
jeffbee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car with its drive-by-wire brakes has a brake feedback simulator that gives the driver the kind of feeling associated with power-boosted hydraulic brakes. This is by far the most expensive single component in the car. Arguably these are just expensive accommodations for human flaws. A self-driving car wouldn't need them. Can't the self-driving system act directly on data like pressure, flow, and displacement?

There are no drive-by-wire brakes in the US or Europe for regular cars. Your car's actuator moves the piston that is mechanically linked to your pedal. So even if the electric system fails completely, you can still actuate the brakes.

[flagged]

Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#44

Post by jashmota »

Hobadee wrote: post #43

> Flywheel Hails cab. Excavator shows up

Haha yes - luckily we don't get this outside SF. We call it flywheel because our mission is to solve data flywheel problem in robotics.

related, this cool photo: https://x.com/jash_mota/status/1969635994220839095

Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#45

Post by jashmota »

jedberg wrote: post #40

I have a question about competition. I had a friend who was in mining about a decade ago. He told me that their mines were fully autonomous back then -- that the equipment managed itself and sent back sensor data. Is that different than what you are doing now?

Mining has had autonomous haulage (and to some extent excavation) for some years. They have been very tightly coupled to the individual machines, models and the quarry site.

Construction excavation workflows tend to be different and more varied (hence you would see more variations in the machines/attachments available for this industry). And so far there's no solution which just works or is plug and play. This is an attempt to solve that.

And we believe this is great time to do so due to market demands too. No way Gen Z is going to do these jobs when you can make money being delivery partner/influencer, etc. The high-certified, high-skilled workforce is going to shockingly shrink in some years.

Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#47

Post by jashmota »

roamerz wrote: post #38
seabrookmx wrote: post #14

> The joysticks are connected to a pilot hydraulic circuit, which proportionally moves the cylinders in the main hydraulic circuit which ultimately moves the excavator joints I've actually spent a decent amount of time running an excavator, as my Dad owns a construction / road building company. It was a great summer job! An important note about the pilot hydraulics is that they _provide feedback to the operator_. I w…

I have a 20 ton Takeuchi and I don’t recall any feedback in the controls at all. The feedback I use is from the seat and sounds of the machine - well besides of course visual of course. I cannot imagine this being useful to me unless the virtual operators cab closely mimicked an actual machine. It would have to have audio from the machine and be on a platform that tilted relative to the real thing. It would also need…

The way I think about this - we should not have multi screens. Human field of vision is 60 degrees for central and about 120 degrees binocular. The bucket of the excavator is way narrower than this which means actual task doesn't require wide vision.

So if we are able to have really good autonomous safety layers to ensure safe movements, and dynamically resize remote teleop windows, you'd make the operator more efficient. So while we stream 360 degree view, we get creative in how we show it.

That's on the vision side. We also stream engine audio, and do haptic feedback.

Takeuchi are interesting! Rare ones to have blades even on bigger sizes - is that why you got one?

Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#48

Post by trhway »

When i first time 35 years ago in Siberia saw an excavator driving itself toward me without driver, i was struck like by lightning and first moment attributed it to hangover. Next moment though i saw the driver walking along the road looking for mushrooms and understood that the deep tracks in the unpaved road are like rails so that the excavator just moves along these tracks. Couple years later (this time another part of the country - a low populated part of the St.Petersburg region) my friends who were vacationing in a remote village there saw one day a large tractor passing on its own through that village, and next day guys came asking whether anybody saw a tractor without driver - the guys were drinking and details of how the tractor got away weren't clear though ...

Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#49

Post by jashmota »

trhway wrote: post #48

When i first time 35 years ago in Siberia saw an excavator driving itself toward me without driver, i was struck like by lightning and first moment attributed it to hangover. Next moment though i saw the driver walking along the road looking for mushrooms and understood that the deep tracks in the unpaved road are like rails so that the excavator just moves along these tracks. Couple years later (this time another pa…

I can relate to how you felt. Even though I developed this myself, when I saw it running remotely with no one sitting inside for the first time, it felt magical and weird. This is going to save lives and look magical and that's too much fun to put off and do something else!

Re: Launch HN: Flywheel (YC S25) – Waymo for Excavators

#50

Post by AlotOfReading »

jashmota wrote: post #47
roamerz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 20 ton Takeuchi and I don’t recall any feedback in the controls at all. The feedback I use is from the seat and sounds of the machine - well besides of course visual of course. I cannot imagine this being useful to me unless the virtual operators cab closely mimicked an actual machine. It would have to have audio from the machine and be on a platform that tilted relative to the real thing. It would also need…

The way I think about this - we should not have multi screens. Human field of vision is 60 degrees for central and about 120 degrees binocular. The bucket of the excavator is way narrower than this which means actual task doesn't require wide vision. So if we are able to have really good autonomous safety layers to ensure safe movements, and dynamically resize remote teleop windows, you'd make the operator more effic…

Just a suggestion from someone who's worked on industrial robots and autonomous vehicles, but I think you're underselling a lot of difficulties here.

Skilled humans have a tendency to fully engage all of their senses during a task. For example, human drivers use their entire field of vision at night even though headlights only illuminate tiny portions of their FoV. I've never operated an excavator, but I would be very surprised if skilled operators only used the portion of their vision immediately around the bucket and not the rest of it for situational awareness.

That said, UI design is a tradeoff. There's a paper that has a nice list of teleoperation design principles [0], which does talk about single windows as a positive. On the other hand, a common principle in older aviation HCI literature is the idea that nothing about the system UI should surprise the human. It's hard to maintain a good idea of the system state when you have it resizing windows automatically.

The hardest thing is going to be making really good autonomous safety layers. It's the most difficult part of building a fully autonomous system anyway. The main advantage of teleop is that you can [supposedly] sidestep having one.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1109/THMS.2014.2371048

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