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Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

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Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#121

Post by ethbr0 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #72
iamstupidsimple wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true today, but it might not last forever. Labor cost in 1st world nations is skyrocketing (due to cost of living mainly) compared to poorer nations, and there may come a time when robotics becomes relatively competitive. Especially when those cheap labor countries start having the same effect.

I think a lot of that comes in the form of partial and adaptive automation, though— like self-checkout at the grocery store, where it's "automation", but only in the sense that the self-checkout console enabled outsourcing the pick and place part of the work onto the consumer. Or elsewhere in the thread, the example of moving a previously-modular computer part onto the logic board, so that it can be soldered on rathe…

I've worked in software automation for about a decade now, and that's been my learned wisdom too.

Don't try and boil the ocean: see what COTS is available, adapt your process to be able to leverage that, plug it in, and move on to the next project

As commentor above noted, volumes have to approach obscene to justify a moderate+ amount of custom, one-off implementation work.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#122

Post by Animats »

csours wrote: post #50

Billion dollar question: do you get more bang for the buck (return on investment, ROI) out of improving robot control schemes, or out of designing the product with automated assembly in mind? Bonus: the ROI changes as you invest in either bucket.

That's a very interesting question.

Apple was once into design for assembly. The Macintosh IIci was Apple's peak at design for assembly. It was designed for vertical assembly. Everything clicks into place with a straight-down insertion move. No wiring harnesses. The power supply plugs into the motherboard. An automated plant in Fremont CA did the assembly.

Then Apple gave up on design for assembly and went to offshoring and cheap labor.

Motorola flip phones were designed for automated assembly. All parts were on boards, and the boards were stacked and compressed into a solid block, with bumps on the boards making connections to the next layer. A tough, reliable phone resulted.

Then Motorola gave up and went to offshoring and cheap labor.

Sony pioneered this approach. The Sony Walkman,, the original tape unit with motors and contra-rotating flywheels, was built for vertical assembly and assembled by a simple Cartesian robot.

Then came the iPod.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#123

Post by xor99 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #103
xor99 wrote: post #94

Robotics is not a software problem and SV companies bias is towards software development (a little different with X but still apparent). I think most companies that try to throw data at existing problems in robotics using existing machines will have a hard time matching human efficiency. For example, in something as straightforward as the usb insertion task. Hardware and mechanical is like 95% of the problem so there…

But it is a software problem. Surprised that you mentioned robotic arm, which is basically just 3-5 servo/stepper motors connected to case and not super complicated to build with 3d printers. It's the software that powers it. Boston dynamics robots are not the top of the line in terms of hardware. It is the software that gives their robot the power to even stand up, which anyone who has coded the robot knows it only…

Sure software is crucial to the final working of the robot and it's not solely all in the physical design. Robots are not possible without software but I think the fundamental problem in robotics for manufacture is about physical intelligence and industrial design and engineering.

My approach would be to manufacture custom arms for particular tasks and in principle 3d printing the arms is exactly what i'm getting at (e.g. that optimised physical design processes save on cost and improves performance much more than software + expensive externally manufactured arms). 3D printed arms with comparable repeat accuracy would be an excellent optimisation over buying v expensive Kuka products. Then you could start think about different mechanisms (compliant mech, soft parts etc) and control systems/software.

Kukas are not really just a couple of servos (e.g. encoders) and there are many examples from the 90s of self walking robots with little software too. There's good literature on "morphological computation" or Rolf Pfeifer's book How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#124

Post by zelon88 »

neltnerb wrote: post #84
motohagiography wrote: post #60

Makes sense. The end state appears to be that humans should only be supervising ML that generates goal and outcome based behaviors for robots, and the machines will construct tools to solve problems themselves. The leap from an AI model learning how to replicate a behaviour (e.g. evolving walking to solve problems https://unitylist.com/p/2id/walking-ai ) to reasoning about it in terms of actuators and physical feedba…

https://www.mujin.co.jp/en/ This is not manual or bespoke and it has sensors. The videos are incredible and they work in real life already. This one is it moving petri dishes full of liquid without spilling! This is obviously not being pre-programmed to move along some kind of 1980s style fixed paths for welding parts as Alphabet apparently thinks everyone is still doing. The obliviousness of suggesting that using ML…

I agree. It appears that Google is trying to pat it's own back in a room full of people who have never seen a modern place of production.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#125

Post by zelon88 »

motohagiography wrote: post #60

Makes sense. The end state appears to be that humans should only be supervising ML that generates goal and outcome based behaviors for robots, and the machines will construct tools to solve problems themselves. The leap from an AI model learning how to replicate a behaviour (e.g. evolving walking to solve problems https://unitylist.com/p/2id/walking-ai ) to reasoning about it in terms of actuators and physical feedba…

Humans design products with a variety of design elements to meet different circumstances.

Look at cars for example. Tell an ML model to "make a car that can drive over rocks" and it will give you a rock crawler with the motor in a location where it won't be easy to fix. Tell the ML model to "make a car that is easy to fix" and it will make a car that is probably unreliable. Tell it to make a car that is reliable and easy to fix you will get a car with no motor at all.

I'm not saying it's impossible, because it obviously is possible. I just think your 20 year time-frame is hopelessly optimistic. What good is an ML model that takes 10 weeks to setup that solves a problem that only takes 2 weeks to solve without ML?

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#127

Post by amelius »

Animats wrote: post #115

Nice. Here's much the same job, being done almost 50 years ago, by a robot at the Stanford AI lab.[1] This robot has both vision and force feedback, and uses them to assemble an automotive water pump. It does the coarse alignment visually, and the fine alignment by feel. [1] https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump

I'm still waiting for a robot that can assemble a LEGO model from a pile of Legos.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#128

Post by jszymborski »

okareaman wrote: post #126

I really dislike this writing structure of "before I get to the point, let me tell you a story about my life" Edit: I'm not alone, https://style.mla.org/dont-bury-the-lede/

Maybe I'm off base here, as it's no small feat by any means, but it's especially jarring to read when "first-website-building-SaaS" has so little to do with industrial robotics at its surface.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#129

Post by colinmhayes »

falcor84 wrote: post #90
extropy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that noone wants to work those jobs anymore and the options are to either import illegal workers being paid below minimal wage or replace by robots.

>noone wants to work those jobs anymore The implication of that in turn is that these US companies aren't willing to pay at a rate that would be competitive in the market

Or that Americans aren't willing to work for the prevailing global wage that manufacturing workers demand. Why would any company keep manufacturing here when labor is so expensive? Effective manufacturing robots would allow manufacturing to move back to the us.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#130

Post by arkitaip »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #92
Twirrim wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon bought Kiva a while back now to do robotics for them, and it's used heavily in their warehouses and facilities around retail side. Anything they can automate through robotics, they try to as robots can work 24x7 (other than maintenance requirements) and over their life span cost less than human workers. They also sponsor engineering competitions around trying to make generalised picking machines. It's good PR…

Tom Scott had a good video a couple of weeks ago about a grocery packing warehouse that has a sophisticated picking network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

That Ocado factory had a fire recently cause by a robot collision, so the quality doesn't seem quite there yet [0]

[0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/19/ocado-warehouse-fir...

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