Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#301

Post by regularfry » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

joshu wrote: post #280

regularfry wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CNC machine is as much a robot as an industrial arm is. I suspect you might specifically mean "autonomous robot"?

is anything with a motor a robot? of course there is a hierarchy, with the stepper-driven open-loop machine he gave as an example being further down the ladder.

No, I mean literally. Industrial arms aren't necessarily any more complex than CNC machines. They may not have any more motors. They perform tasks of similar complexity, with similar programming models. We call them "robot arms" quite happily.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#302

Post by iancmceachern » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #299

skratlo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yadayada, you're all robots, artificial humans, walking calculators. tell me what those low income workers will do when you take away their jobs?

What happened to gas lighters when street lights were replaced with electric lights?

Or midnight soil rakers

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#303

Post by notJim » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #299

skratlo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yadayada, you're all robots, artificial humans, walking calculators. tell me what those low income workers will do when you take away their jobs?

What happened to gas lighters when street lights were replaced with electric lights?

Well, what did happen to them? The implication of your statement was that they were obviously totally fine, but is that a given? It's possible they were miserable and then died. Switching careers is not always easy and smooth.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#304

Post by gibolt » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #295

altcognito wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you there is a huge market for something that works well in the 40-50k range. You are vastly, vastly underestimating this market. Hotels have a variety of tasks they would love to replace a host of low cost labor with robots with. Someone in a higher income bracket wouldn’t think twice about that cost if it did significant work. On the other hand, the bar is high (cleaning, folding, picking up -- all are s…

A hotel is a great application for robots since the rooms could be designed for their capabilities.

And they are consistent. Make it work in the few distinct layout configurations and specific hotel appliances, and then it can repeat on all the rooms.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#305

Post by Robotbeat » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

Looks nice, but $20k??

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#306

Post by kwhitefoot » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

> he hopes to see the robot deployed in home environments,

It will need bigger wheels or legs then because it would be stuck in one room in my house because of the thresholds at each doorway and the rugs and carpets.

And my house has three stories so I would need three of them because it can't climb stairs.

It's getting tiresome to read crap like this because while it might work in a dwelling purpose built for it it is guaranteed useless in most dwellings occupied by real people right now.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#307

Post by colmvp » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #196

gexla wrote: post #106

Kids' chores 2000: Take out the trash, 2 minutes. Kid's chores 2020: Up until 3AM programming the robot to take out the trash. Purchased the robot two weeks ago. Kid only moves to go to sleep. Trash is building up. No other chores are getting done. Chores dashboard is flashing red. Take out trash sprint way overdue.

Calvin and Hobbes already did this plotline https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/09/01

Haha brilliant! Haven't read C&H in decades and I forgot about how he inadvertently accomplished his goal.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#308

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

Tenobrus wrote: post #212

espadrine wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first point has an obvious response and the last is speculative. I find interesting to address the middle one statistically. A given machine has a number of random events that can kill it. Each possible event type i can be modeled as a Poisson process Xᵢ with, in a given year, probability λᵢ. The machine survives in a given year if no occurrence of event i happens, with probability Pr(Xᵢ = 0) = exp(-λᵢ). For inst…

Why does your argument not show that cars would have a similar lifetime?

[deleted]

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#309

Post by ogre_codes » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

They dropped the ball on the demo. If they really wanted to blow me away they'd have demonstrated the robot opening the fridge and bringing me a beer.

A bit more seriously, this is a research platform. Maybe in 5-10 years it'll prove to be the seed of some interesting tech, but right now it's just a lab experiment. If you buy this and expect it to do basic housework for you, you are destined to be disappointed.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#310

Post by Ajedi32 » Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

nick0garvey wrote: post #30

The idea of it being controlled by a remote person makes me feel like a new breed of gig-jobs could be around the corner. Buy a robot, and pay someone remotely to do your housekeeping for you. The housekeeper could even operate it from their smartphones.

Keep in mind the videos in the article were sped up 6-10x, and even at that speed they were painfully slow compared to what a human could do in person.

If you can hire a remote operator to control a robot for half of the hourly wage that you would have to pay for someone to show up in-person to perform the same task that's still not anywhere close to economical if the robot also takes 10x as long, even if you ignore the up-front cost of the robot itself.

In order for something like that to make sense the robots would either have to become comparable to humans in the speed at which they are able perform their respective tasks, or the tasks would need to be at least partially automated so that an operator can control multiple robots at once.