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Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

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Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#121

Post by Animats »

giwook wrote: post #52

Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date. SoftBank has now exercised that option.

Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#122

Post by ckemere »

serf wrote: post #98
fooker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…

automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.

Amazon warehouses still have a huge number of ununionized workers doing manual labor

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#123

Post by bigmadshoe »

Hugsbox wrote: 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.

Two things: 1) we have abundant training data for humanoid embodiments (watch humans do things), and 2) the world is already designed for humans.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#124

Post by notahacker »

nradov wrote: post #39
Hugsbox wrote: 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…

Some colleague of mine visited the Mini plant earlier this week. Apparently they had a Boston Dynamics dog patrolling simply to spot stuff that had been left where it wasn't supposed to be left

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#125

Post by [deleted] »

Hugsbox wrote: 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.

[deleted]

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#126

Post by saltcured »

Hugsbox wrote: 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 understand the sentiment, but you assume they are planning to build humanoid robots to walk around the human-oriented space in the factory.

Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#127

Post by btown »

j-pb wrote: post #65
looperhacks wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if these tasks are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity for a purpose-built robot, how can a general purpose robot perform them better? If anything, they should be doing worse. The only thing I can think of are tasks that are so rarely done, it's not economical to build a robot for. But I then I also don't see how another robot solves this problem.

These robots operate on completely different principles. One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines. The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks…

It's also worth noting that when e.g. inputs to a stage might have unpredictable defects or alignment, a robot arm utilizing neural networks for planning and analysis might still be the best way to handle that - without the extra degree of freedom of movement-relative-to-floor, planning can be done more rapidly, and movement can be executed more aggressively and quickly.

If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#128

Post by alnwlsn »

Gud wrote: post #77
vlovich123 wrote: post #60

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.

> much better dexterity than any human

Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather.

Robots can certainly do things more repeatably, if not more precisely.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#129

Post by ACCount37 »

cpgxiii wrote: post #90
ACCount37 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/f…

"Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts.

Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.

At a certain point, the tasks that remain stop being "dexterity" problems and start being "AI" problems. That is: a robot could do the task - if you either spent big $$$ on redesigning the entire task around the robot's intellectual limitations (uneconomical), or if you had an incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving driving that robot (impossible with 00s AI).

The "universal robot" bet is the "incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving" bet. That in 2020s, AI is finally capable. The body only has to be "good enough to make most tasks possible".

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#130

Post by [deleted] »

Hugsbox wrote: 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.

[deleted]
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