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Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

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Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#71

Post by mbil »

heaney-555 wrote: post #60
qurren wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.

Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#72

Post by nozzlegear »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #59
RandomLensman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly: why?

I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space. That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc. It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as…

Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal with all of that stuff.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#75

Post by FartyMcFarter »

nozzlegear wrote: post #72
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space. That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc. It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as…

Usually you hire a cleaning company who sends a person they've hired and vetted to clean, you don't have to deal with all of that stuff.

Then I have to deal with whichever random person they decide to send. I can't be the only one who finds this annoying (even if I'm not in the majority).

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#76

Post by RandomLensman »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #59
RandomLensman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly: why?

I don't want a person I don't know very well in my space. That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc. It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as…

You'd need to manage the robot, too, I would think. In my experience, I rather manage people than machines.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#77

Post by hwillis »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #12

These robots look slow and not very fluid in their motions, but LLMs like ChatGPT also looked very dumb initially. If progress is as fast as LLMs , this could have massive applications in a few years.

The time between gpt 2 and 3 was 15 months. The time between gemini robotics 1 and 2 was also 15 months: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/h...

The difference between gpt 2 and 3 was insane. 2 could generate limericks when it wasn't repeating a word 300x. 3 could actually do some things. By comparison gemini robotics has hardly changed at all.

I will also point out that slow, non-fluid robotics is on a totally different level of difficulty from fast fluid motion. Asimov could walk pretty smoothly, but it didn't fall over because it used a very careful sequence that was never unbalanced; you could pause at any point without falling over. Move faster, like boston dynamics, and you need to account for the change in balance from your arms swinging... or rather, you need to be able to account for the rotational inertia etc from moving multiple masses along complex paths with multiple points of articulation at hundreds or thousands of times per second.

An algorithm to fold tshirts 90% of the time is easy. The cloth hangs down by gravity and you can just look for right angles (corners), find their coordinates with binocular matching, and move them to meet each other. Getting 99%, or folding them quickly, so that the fabric is actually moving instead of just hanging still- incredibly, incredibly more complex.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#78

Post by heaney-555 »

xgulfie wrote: post #70
heaney-555 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't be waiting more than 5-10 years.

Level 5 automomy has been "only five years away" for 15 years

You're probably thinking of Level 4. No one thought Level 5 was coming before 2050 until a few years ago.

And Level 4 is already here, scaling up, while we're seeing the first real signs of Level 5 (Tesla FSD Supervised).

The progress here is staggering - I'm not sure why you're so cynical!

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#79

Post by tootie »

qurren wrote: post #40
pwython wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#80

Post by Chabsff »

brendong wrote: post #74

Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age

Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.

That makes them extremely easy to sell to industry. This unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped industrial automation market that still relies on human labor because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn't make sense.

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