11–20 of 26 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would buy that today if the battery life was not abysmal. It is though; that is, at least for me, a far larger issue than all else. We cannot make laptops or phones work an entire day; robots/drones are measured in minutes.
What would you use it for that needs long battery life?
That Unitree G1 [1] in the video starts at $16k, which surprised me. I’m guessing end effectors drive that price way up but it feels like we are maybe a decade away from useful household humanoid robots for the price of a cheap car, which would put it well within the means of many in the developed world. Does anyone have any insight on how realistically far away the control and programming is from that reality? A bun…
For reference the spot robot from Boston dynamics starts at 74k usd.
So you could literally have a team of humanoids for the price of a spot.
They are more of a "compressed version of a common denominator for these movements". I.e. while sample walking seems more joyful and proud, aking to strutting, the robot one seems akin to stumbling.
Looking at the fighting movements - the nuances not picked up by the simulation and the robot are highly important and are what makes the punch a punch instead of a weird shove, what makes a good stance vs bad stance. Just like the walking nuances swing it from "happy" to "drunk" to "threatening", so do they for others.
While I understand the issue of compression from "real movement -> digitally constrained simulation -> physically constrainted robot", just want to bring it up as attention to those details will probably be important to general training. While at this stage it is not that big of a deal, in any kind of real environment they will define the human-robot interaction and robot-env interaction.
Otherwise great job!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you use it for that needs long battery life?
Shopping (which takes hours where I live), picking olives (it will take forever if you have to hop into the charger every 15 minutes), carrying my backpack on walks etc.
Both the things that look like Roombas and all these: https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE?si=9mCtiKKkk_N9Uk7z
No single consumer would buy all that, but the retailers can.
That Unitree G1 [1] in the video starts at $16k, which surprised me. I’m guessing end effectors drive that price way up but it feels like we are maybe a decade away from useful household humanoid robots for the price of a cheap car, which would put it well within the means of many in the developed world. Does anyone have any insight on how realistically far away the control and programming is from that reality? A bun…
I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on battery capacity.
My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-driving car (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at most 1/10th the available power to do that (because they're physically smaller).
Between algorithmic improvements and Koomey's law, I think this will take at least 5 years between any given category of customer being able to afford no-steering-wheel-needed self driving cars, and the equivalent for androids.
Given the Waymos were doing geo-fenced cars with no safety drivers in the vehicles in 2017 (but still had an employee in the back with access to an emergency stop button)*, this gap is compatible with the recent press releases and youtube videos going around about robotics — but as nobody has yet started actually shipping this level of self-driving cars directly to end users**, my only guess for personal general-purpose domestic androids is: some time after 2030 as a minimum, but probably later than that.
* https://phys.org/news/2017-11-waymo-autonomous-vans-human-dr...
** No, Tesla's current one doesn't count; it will only count when it actually ships without a steering wheel or when people are actually allowed to use it while sleeping.
That Unitree G1 [1] in the video starts at $16k, which surprised me. I’m guessing end effectors drive that price way up but it feels like we are maybe a decade away from useful household humanoid robots for the price of a cheap car, which would put it well within the means of many in the developed world. Does anyone have any insight on how realistically far away the control and programming is from that reality? A bun…
The Unitree links claim a 9000mAh battery will last it 2 hours; I don't know the voltage, but even at 5.5 V cells, that's only about 25 W average power consumption. I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on battery capacity. My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-dri…
When you connect 2 9000 mAh cells in series, the resulting battery has 2x the voltage but the same mAh capacity. In parallel, the battery has the same voltage but 2x the mAh.
> My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-driving car (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at most 1/10th the available power to do that (because they're physically smaller).
This seems logically flawed:
1. A car travels hundreds of miles from home. Why would a robot walk more than a while from a transport or home base? At short distances, if you truly need that power, it probably makes more sense to stream data/video over a direct low-latency connection. Long distance networking has a latency comparable to camera frame time, but even a normal wifi router can keep a lower latency than human nerve delay.
2. Humanoid robots will never be running at 85 mph past a bunch of people. They probably don't need to have the same compute throughput as a car, and definitely don't need to have the same reaction time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Unitree links claim a 9000mAh battery will last it 2 hours; I don't know the voltage, but even at 5.5 V cells, that's only about 25 W average power consumption. I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on battery capacity. My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-dri…
You misunderstand battery specs. It's a 13 string (more commonly, 13s) battery- a string is a number of cells wired in series. By convention that's a 48 volt battery, which matches with the 54 volt charger. In total that's a 421 watt-hour battery, for an average power of ~210 watts over 2 hours. When you connect 2 9000 mAh cells in series, the resulting battery has 2x the voltage but the same mAh capacity. In paralle…
That Unitree G1 [1] in the video starts at $16k, which surprised me. I’m guessing end effectors drive that price way up but it feels like we are maybe a decade away from useful household humanoid robots for the price of a cheap car, which would put it well within the means of many in the developed world. Does anyone have any insight on how realistically far away the control and programming is from that reality? A bun…
The Unitree links claim a 9000mAh battery will last it 2 hours; I don't know the voltage, but even at 5.5 V cells, that's only about 25 W average power consumption. I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on battery capacity. My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-dri…
Edit: to clarify, my expectation is that the compute is on-location, so the latency is in the scale of <1ms more so than 10-100ms from cloud offloading