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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

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Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#231

Post by rishabhaiover »

Judgmentality wrote: post #137
MountDoom wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought. You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to…

> Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to…

I’d rather put my faith in his grand illusions than in your sanctimonious high priest pose.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#232

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #225
wongarsu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1]. I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good 1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/193139178330667851…

> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems.

Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently.

This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools.

Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well.

"Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#233

Post by higginsniggins »

rishabhaiover wrote: post #231
Judgmentality wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to…

I’d rather put my faith in his grand illusions than in your sanctimonious high priest pose.

who do you think spins "grand illusions" if not your "high priest" who dosn't even know you exist.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#234

Post by superpope99 »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #232
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people s…

have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#235

Post by givemeethekeys »

crnkofe wrote: post #228

Even if its just a demo its really slick. Tech has come a long way. Can't say I want to talk to a droid to check-in at a hotel or bump into one at home all the time but I'm sure there are some obvious civilian use cases around.

At a certain price point, our choice will be either hotel with bot or AirBnb.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#236

Post by 93po »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #225
wongarsu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1]. I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good 1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/193139178330667851…

> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#237

Post by 93po »

paxys wrote: post #179
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #161

Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. The frog boils quickly.

> None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case. I'm not saying one shouldn't be hopeful, but it's also not hard to see why people here are generally more conservative about the near future.

BD up until very recently only focused on hydraulics were which were extremely loud, expensive, bulky, and expensive to maintain. It was basically impossible to find a use case for such a thing that didn't have to cohabitate in spaces with humans. They also lacked the modeling for it to do much of anything other than walk, and even then recent advances in ML have in only a couple of years massively outperformed their in-house attempts that took 20.

BD was a money-burning machine that suckled off the teat of the miltiary industrial complex, where billions of dollars can be casually lost and there's no accountability and no one notices its gone. Their tech was cool, though, and their engineers did awesome work.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#238

Post by Wingman4l7 »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #178
natemcintosh wrote: post #23

I would love to have something like this for all the chores around my house. But I also have serious reservations about the increased level insight into my private home life this could provide to the manufacturer. Look at cases like the ring camera security violations [1]. A moving robot could be an order of magnitude more invasive of your privacy. If I were to purchase this, I would want serious privacy guarantees.…

"Figure 03 also includes 10 Gbps mmWave data offload capability, allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement." Yeah I'll pass thanks.

It's the only way this kind of robot will ever be successful. It's a bit like the driverless car approach -- get the hardware out into the real world with minimum viable performance, then desperately snaffle up as much real-world training data as you can to feed into your model, and hopefully your model will improve enough before your VC funding runs out / your product fails on the market / your product gets regulated out of existence / etc.

Simulation isn't sufficient for ML in robotics -- and they simply don't have enough training data.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#239

Post by whatever1 »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #225
wongarsu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1]. I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good 1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/193139178330667851…

> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

Of course it does not. We just add scanners in up down left and right of the conveyor. Never touching the package.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#240

Post by numpad0 »

pants2 wrote: post #30
4b11b4 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them. But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in... Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of…

I believe Elon has said before re:Tesla factory that plugging in cords is one of the hardest things to automate.

They're building cars, so it's more like ATX 24pin style cables, but this is generally true. Cables, wires, ropes type of objects are like cardboard thin robots with hundred joints in series and under someone else's control, so it's hard for robots to deal with. If you think about it, people hate cables too. We easily get tangled in headphone cables when they're wired, and we fail to coil or untangle Ethernet cables properly all the time.

EV charger style of short, thick cables should not be THAT hard, though. The more likely problem here is that they just can't handle the task of securing and inserting the head of the cable against resistance.

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