Not sure what the drawers are on the robot but one of the humanoid robots I saw changed its own battery that was pretty cool (I think it had 2).
BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
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Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#22I think this is going to be bad for BMW, and bad for the current robotics-summer. I _hope_ that’s not the case, I’d love for robotics to get deployed more widely in manufacturing. But I’m pretty sure it will be. I think the chances of meaningful success would be higher with non-humanoid robotics
This is top-tier vagueposting.
Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#23Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from which someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau where they run some simple calculations. Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.
I wish I was making this stuff up.
Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#24Seems to be this European robotics company
https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#25Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#26Why doesn't anybody do the shoulder complex right? It gives me itches to scratch.
Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#27I think this is going to be bad for BMW, and bad for the current robotics-summer. I _hope_ that’s not the case, I’d love for robotics to get deployed more widely in manufacturing. But I’m pretty sure it will be. I think the chances of meaningful success would be higher with non-humanoid robotics
This is top-tier vagueposting.
Feel free to ask for more details if you have specific questions! I worked in robotics for many years, I have some decent familiarity with this space. Here’s some more detailed thoughts “for free”:
Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.
There are many good practitioners that write about these and other limitations, I think Rodney Brooks has some good discussion of it, eg. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#28Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from whi…
That might actually describe a pretty good implementation of an interface to SAP.
I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.
Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
#29Seems to be this European robotics company https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
Hexagon is very prominent in precision manufacturing through their dimensional measurement robots (CMM Coordinate Measurement Machine) and other metrology software/hardware. This is most likely why they were chosen by BMW, as I imagine they already have a working relationship together, although the EU aspect could have contributed as well.
I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.