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Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

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111–120 of 431 posts

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#111
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal. This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high. Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shazeer

Can we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born?

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#112

I still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.

Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.

Google dumping a project when it does not produce instant results?

That seems out of character

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just one of today's lucky ten thousand. https://xkcd.com/1053/

According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.

The math on the xkcd is just wrong tbh. In multiple ways.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#114
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) the idea is that these robots do have dexterity capabilities a lot closer to human hands B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.

These industrial robots have much better dexterity than any human alive. The point is, human shape plus general purpose intelligence is an amazing combination to resolve the “long tail”. Without the intelligence part, the body is useless. Perhaps Boston Dynamics has that part resolved now too.

The human arms and hands are very versatile, and imitating them is a good choice for a universal robot, though 3 or 4 arms are definitely better than 2, and the hardest to imitate are the sensors, not the actuators.

But the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment, so the arms could be mounted on a mobile base that does not have any resemblance to a human.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#115
post #39
post #31

I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful . Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.

I took a tour of the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg body shop. It's heavily automated with industrial robots inside safety cages. But they still have human workers pick up parts from rolling carts and place them into templates for the robot arms. BMW has been running a trial with Figure humanoid robots to automate that remaining piece. Apparently those robots haven't worked very well, but presumably Hyundai thinks they…

Can't you just, you know, stick another robot arm on the damn carts and have it offload itself? Surely there's a simpler way.

Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#116
post #31

I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful . Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.

I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. What remains unautomated, then? The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditi…

What you need then is a better arm (or even just hand), not a human.

Or a new take on car design with automated production in mind regarding all the wiring and what not (easier said than done, I'm sure many have tried and failed, but eventually someone will succeed).

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#117
post #31

I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful . Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.

I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. What remains unautomated, then? The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditi…

> I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated.

This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#118
post #31

I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful . Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.

Training data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#120
post #31

I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful . Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.

Maybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.
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