Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reasons robotics is hard

secondthoughts.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 77 posts

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#11

Post by robotresearcher »

mr_toad wrote: post #9
kooi wrote: post #6

Yes the problem is very hard. Mainly because high DOF generalization is very difficult. We have self driving cars because what are the control inputs? Pedal, brake, steering wheel. This already took many many years. Now for a humanoid robot: An action space that is metaphorically Hilbert. (Physically, yes, obviously) Also, IMO, LLM's can aid the development of robots, but do little beyond a planning, human control in…

> So we'll need neural methods which can be learned Data is a problem. LLMs had the advantage of the whole internet to train on. Robots don’t have that corpus of information. And real time learning seems to be something that everyone in AI is studiously ignoring.

The hope is that RL in simulation can fill the gap.

Also there’s imitating humans, via a suitable mapping from the human sensor, control and configuration space to the robot’s. Some groups have gathered video and other data from humans doing tasks, for example with a VR headset.

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#12

Post by robotresearcher »

logicallee wrote: post #2

people very soon as going to look back at all of us and just think "they didn't even have robots yet! how did they even eat?" Well, future readers, it isn't easy! We either go to the store and bring back groceries ourselves or pay a helper to do it. No robot in the loop there. Then when it comes time to cook something we either have to cut it up and otherwise prepare it and then cook it ourselves, or another human ca…

> We either go to the store and bring back groceries ourselves or pay a helper to do it.

Or order it from Amazon, in which case there was likely a robot in the pipeline.

Robots are very widely deployed, but almost entirely invisibly to the customer yet.

Roomba is the main exception.

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#15

Post by dyauspitr »

Onavo wrote: post #8
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #3

Roboticist here. All of this, and he didn’t mention compliance or online adaptation to otherwise un-sensable dynamics. Or massively complex miniature mechanisms. Current generation tactile sensors cost a couple thousand $ PER FINGER, and have a real world MTBF of hours. The cost can be solved with economy of scale. The fragility is harder.

> Current generation tactile sensors cost a couple thousand $ PER FINGER, and have a real world MTBF of hours. The cost can be solved with economy of scale. The fragility is harder. Are we talking about experimental laboratory ones here? What happens when the Alibaba players start getting into the game? They have plenty of humanoid robots.

How much more sensitive do you need to be compared to say a standard mobile capacitive screen and those are essentially dirt cheap at this point.

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#16

Post by dyauspitr »

kooi wrote: post #6

Yes the problem is very hard. Mainly because high DOF generalization is very difficult. We have self driving cars because what are the control inputs? Pedal, brake, steering wheel. This already took many many years. Now for a humanoid robot: An action space that is metaphorically Hilbert. (Physically, yes, obviously) Also, IMO, LLM's can aid the development of robots, but do little beyond a planning, human control in…

I don’t think the complexity scales with every additional degree of freedom like you are painting here. I think it’s just a matter of getting the right training data in sufficient quantities for an LLM to output across all degrees of freedom simultaneously without it being some exponential leap.

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#17

Post by Animats »

A marker of progress will be when Amazon converts to automated picking. They've been trying hard for almost a decade now. They had an annual competition for years. They have a decent picking robot developed in house.[1] It's not being deployed in quantity yet. Nor does it have anything like a humanoid hand. Just a two-surface gripper. Amazon's production robots are mostly automatic guided vehicles, not manipulators.

I'm impressed with how far legged locomotion has come. But as yet, nobody seems to be using legged robots for any commercial purpose beyond the demo level.

Is Tesla still going to produce vast numbers of humanoid robots by the end of 2026?

There's been a lot of progress on the hardware side. Motor technology from drones has produced much better robot motors. The sweet spot on gear reduction seems to have been found. (Too much reduction, and you can't back drive. Too little, and the motors have to be too big.) The volumes are now large enough to justify making robot-specific components. Robot arms are much better than a decade ago. So are robot legs. Control is better, too. It looks like a humanoid robot will cost about as much as a car.

But they're still not quite good enough to be useful.

We'll know they are real when an Amazon Prime truck drives up and a robot does the last 100 meters of the delivery.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WStK9HNn8c8&

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#19

Post by NichoPaolucci »

logicallee wrote: post #2

people very soon as going to look back at all of us and just think "they didn't even have robots yet! how did they even eat?" Well, future readers, it isn't easy! We either go to the store and bring back groceries ourselves or pay a helper to do it. No robot in the loop there. Then when it comes time to cook something we either have to cut it up and otherwise prepare it and then cook it ourselves, or another human ca…

Eat? You must be living under a rock. We've been evaporating our sustenance and storing it in the cloud for years.

Perhaps nanobots will be able to carry the chemical makeup of a cheeseburger and rebuild a bite directly in our mouths, no cooking necessary!

Re: Reasons robotics is hard

#20

Post by the_sleaze_ »

andsoitis wrote: post #18

hairstylists are safe. and manicurists. and outcall masseurs. really anything that involves a bade near your body or where body contact is the point.

They've already got a kind of masseur. You put on a spandex outfit to reduce friction and lay under 2 arms apparently.

> https://www.aescape.com/

Post reply on HN