It’s not X. It’s Y. Multiple times, over and over. We need to stop with the AI stuff.
Oh my god, it's absolutely chock full of AI-isms. Almost every sentence is a list of 3 items, often nested lists of 3 items.
The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#32You can redesign every single actuator, sure. Or you can design a wrist camera and use it to close the loop. Or just run enough imitation learning + "RL IRL" and fold the imperfect real world actuators into the policy implicitly.
Robotics doesn't have a single silver bullet - the design space is vast and underexplored.
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#33That's a nice piece of motor engineering. It's well known that high ratio gearboxes for robots are a headache. Back driveability doesn't work, and tiny teeth are fragile. Comments on this go all the way back to Feynman writing about his time spent engineering automatic gunnery aiming systems in WWII. This new discovery is that gearbox problems mess up a machine learning system. It's trying to track gearbox noise and…
(I am not a mechanical engineer) Are capstan drives a solution to some of these gearing problems?
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#34It’s not X. It’s Y. Multiple times, over and over. We need to stop with the AI stuff.
Deciding whether A is an X or a Y is a really basic part of why we're all communicating. Suspicion of em dashes is one thing, but once you start getting nervous on seeing "It’s not X. It’s Y." then you're just going to get paranoid.
The fundamentals of an LLM is to statistically match their output with the corpus. The tics they have are really common in natural human usage too.
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one major draw to human-like for factors is the reuse of existing ecosystems and tools. If you have human-like grasping, you can reuse tools and utensils for human hands, otherwise, you need custom attachments. If you have human-like legs you can navigate stairs, wear pants for customization, and possibly operate a car or bike. Its a bit like choosing JS / python -- of course performance is inferior to a comp…
Reuse tools to do what? Touch type on a mechanical keyboard? What makes human hands especially suitable for e.g. assembling a phone or installing a door handle onto a car?
> Touch type on a mechanical keyboard
yes. do you think it's safe to just plug usb into some hole and type? the safest option for a robot is typing with fingers
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#36That's a nice piece of motor engineering. It's well known that high ratio gearboxes for robots are a headache. Back driveability doesn't work, and tiny teeth are fragile. Comments on this go all the way back to Feynman writing about his time spent engineering automatic gunnery aiming systems in WWII. This new discovery is that gearbox problems mess up a machine learning system. It's trying to track gearbox noise and…
(I am not a mechanical engineer) Are capstan drives a solution to some of these gearing problems?
They don't back-drive well. The whole point of this hand design is to back-drive the contact forces into the motor, where there's force control. They're somewhat bulky, too.
Key concept: force-based motor control works quite well. Preserve that property through the gear train and force-based hand control works.
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I am not a mechanical engineer) Are capstan drives a solution to some of these gearing problems?
They don't back-drive well. The whole point of this hand design is to back-drive the contact forces into the motor, where there's force control. They're somewhat bulky, too. Key concept: force-based motor control works quite well. Preserve that property through the gear train and force-based hand control works.
> They don't back-drive well
What? An ideal capstan drive can be backdriven perfectly fine. You only run into problems once it stops being ideal (e.g. built out of heavy parts, high gear ratio, etc.)
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#38"This deployment is temporarily paused" is the crappiest "this account has gone over its budget" error page ever. Does that mean the site's down, or is that some meta-joke like "you've reached the end of the Internet"? Quick, explain to my non-technical friends what a "deployment" is. They're not trying to go on a deployment; they're trying to look at a website.
In this case, I'm not sure it matters what it says or how your non-technical friends interpret it. The site is down. Why it is down doesn't change the next thing casual viewers will do (close the tab).
> The site is down.
Is it? The title is "The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock". For all I know, it's a joke about what deadlock looks like for robots, showing what could be interpreted as a deadlock in a webserver. At a glance, I can't tell if the site is down, or if it's up and correctly showing its very short message.
So, yeah, in reality, I'm 99% sure it really is an error message. That's only because I've seen similar error messages in the past and can infer how to interpret it.
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#39It’s not X. It’s Y. Multiple times, over and over. We need to stop with the AI stuff.
Deciding whether A is an X or a Y is a really basic part of why we're all communicating. Suspicion of em dashes is one thing, but once you start getting nervous on seeing "It’s not X. It’s Y." then you're just going to get paranoid. The fundamentals of an LLM is to statistically match their output with the corpus. The tics they have are really common in natural human usage too.
Did you read the article? It's all AI tells. The tone may as well be a fax machine
Re: The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't back-drive well. The whole point of this hand design is to back-drive the contact forces into the motor, where there's force control. They're somewhat bulky, too. Key concept: force-based motor control works quite well. Preserve that property through the gear train and force-based hand control works.
> They don't back-drive well What? An ideal capstan drive can be backdriven perfectly fine. You only run into problems once it stops being ideal (e.g. built out of heavy parts, high gear ratio, etc.)
It's the high reduction ratio that's the problem. If you build a 200:1 capstan, it's not going to back drive well. And it won't be anywhere near ideal.