I'm always wondering at the safety measures on these things. How much force is in those motors? This is basically safety-critical stuff but with LLMs. Hallucinating wrong answers in text is bad, hallucinating that your chest is a drawer to pull open is very bad.
That's actually more of a solved problem. Robot arms that can track the force they're applying and where to avoid injuring humans have been kicking around for 10-15 years. It let them go out of the mega safety cells into the same space as people and even do things like letting the operator pose the robot to teach it positions instead of having to do it in a computer program or with a remote control. The term I see a…
Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
171–178 of 178 posts
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is how I would design it. It is common in safety critical PLC systems to have 1 or more separate safety PLCs that try to prevent bad things from happening.
Although in a SIL safety system the dangerous events are identified and extremely thoroughly characterized as part of system design. There cannot be a safety system of this type for a generalist platform like a humanoid robot. It's possibility space is just too high. I think the safety governor in this case would have to be a neural network that is at least as complex as the robots network, if not more so. Which begs…
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have dedicated controllers for the motors that limit their max torque.
That's not enough. When a robot link is in motion and hits an object, the change in momentum creates an impulse over the duration of deceleration. The faster the robot moves, the faster it has to decelerate, the higher the instantaneous braking force at the impact point.
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#174There’s nothing I want more than a robot that does house chores. That’s the real 10x multiplier for humans to do what they do best.
To me this is such a weird wish. Why would you not want to care for your home and the people living there? Why would you want to have a slave taking these activities from you? I'd rather have less waged labour and more time for chores with the family.
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#175At this point, this is enough autonomy to have a set of these guys man a howitzer (read as old stockpiles of weapons we already have). Kind of a scary thought. On one hand, I think the idea of moving real people out of danger in war is a good idea, and as an American i'd want Americans to have an edge... and we can't guarantee our enemies won't take it if we skip it, on the other hand I have a visceral reaction to ma…
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a big deal on the battlefield.
I'd say a very big deal when munitions and targeting are involved
Battle fields are violent and exhausting, people get the shakes, make mistakes, hurt themselves and each other all the time. Munitions are generally designed to not explode from a bump in the road or getting dropped or squeezed, and targeting systems commonly support automatic tracking or similar, for this specific reason.
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#177The demo is quite interesting but I am mostly intrigued by the claim that it is running totally local to each robot. It seems to use some agentic decision making but the article doesn't touch on that. What possible combo of model types are they stringing together? Or is this something novel? The article mentions that the system in each robot uses two ai models. S2 is built on a 7B-parameter open-source, open-weight V…
Re: Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black Mirror has the perfect episode for this scenario already.
Except those things would be very easily defeated by a 12 gauge shotgun or a AR-15