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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

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Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#321

Post by swiftcoder »

smegger001 wrote: post #274
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I h…

The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#322

Post by rowanG077 »

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…

Isn't the entire point that LLMs are unreasonably better at even specific things that you would naively think a purpose build system would be good at.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#323

Post by serf »

kibwen wrote: post #256
ACCount37 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotics has a big training data problem. But your "we don't have the sensors" claim is absolutely laughable. It was never about the sensors. It was always about AI.

No, it doesn't matter if you have a hypergenius superintelligence if it's locked in a body with no hardware support for useful proprioception. You will not go to space today.

A 'hypergenius superintelligence' could achieve most, if not all useful proprioception simply by looking at motor amperage draw, or if that's unavailable then total system amperage draw.

An arm moving against gravity has a higher draw, the arc itself creates characteristics, a motion or force against the arm or fingers generates a change in draw -- a superintellligence would need only an ammeter to master proprioception, because human researchers can do this in a lab and they're nowhere near the bar of 'hypergenius superintelligence'.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#324

Post by jjaksic »

MakeAJiraTicket wrote: post #301
Animats wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking. That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that? It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot,…

The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...

Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#325

Post by serf »

gonzobonzo wrote: post #261
hadlock wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where I'm at. If you look at Boston Dynamics' first videos, they're 45 second clips of 4 legged robots walking in not even a straight line, just proving they could walk 5 feet over level ground without falling over. The top comment, from 4 years ago is "This was 11 years ago. Now these things are dancing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8 If you can make it look believable on camera for 15 seconds…

The robot (BigDog) in that video shows numerous capabilities that Spot still can't do (climbing over terrain like that, being able to respond to a kick like that, the part on the ice, etc.). Even 16 years later. This only highlights the fact that making a cool prototype do a few cool things on video is far, far easier than making a commercial product that can consistently do these things reliably. It often takes deca…

It's an unfair comparison. Yes, they're both 4 legged 'dogs', but they use radically different design criteria -- design criteria that the BigDog was used to refine.

I'm not surprised that a Honda Civic can't navigate the Dakar Rally route..

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#326

Post by fragmede »

wongarsu wrote: post #125
HAL3000 wrote: post #78

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not u…

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…

Economy of scale. This guy wanted a factory in China to do a custom run of a product where they didn't include the shell. It was cheaper to just buy 10,000 units and have a line to de-shell the items than it was to change the original line. That special purpose robot for the one task is going to get beat out by the general purpose robot thats being produced at 100x the volume.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#327

Post by fragmede »

swiftcoder wrote: post #321
smegger001 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I h…

The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold

The problem is that human immigrant labor is, well, human. Cost isn't the only metric being considered.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#328

Post by voidUpdate »

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.

Surely if the cable design was under your control, you could make it a lot easier for an automated system to plug in. Have it be sort of like a TRS jack, but cone-shaped. Then you don't have to get it perfectly aligned, it will align itself when inserted. Put a magnet in the tip to hold it in place, or some sort of electrically actuated lock that the robot can unlock when it wants to unplug the cable

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#329

Post by ileonichwiesz »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #128

Folks are very critical. Consider: this is the worst they will ever be. You improve one robot at one task, they all can share that training. It will only get better from here.

> Consider: this is the worst they will ever be.

This is probably what people in the 18th century thought when they saw that digesting duck automaton [1]. Technological progress isn’t a magical linear thing that always leads to things getting better over time.

There’s some very hard problems to solve before the promises made here can be made true, and it’s not a given that they will or even can be solved. Building the robot was never the hard part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck

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