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Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

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Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#41
post #13
post #3

Weird. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27861201

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

The fittest robot for any application is indistinguishable from an appliance or a machine tool made for that application.

If your robot can't receive either of those labels, your robot company is doomed to a slow death.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#44
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

The fittest robot for any application is indistinguishable from an appliance or a machine tool made for that application. If your robot can't receive either of those labels, your robot company is doomed to a slow death.

I cannot agree enough - we always used to say the best robots aren't called robots, they're called washing machines and dishwashers.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#45
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was ever meant to be live driving at highway speeds: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stefanseltz-axmacher/2020/06/16... The point was that it was an autonomous system that could ask for help, and the "help" scenarios would mostly be cases where the truck was already stopped or at very low speeds: navigating a construction zone, a transfer yard, etc. Possibly in some of these situations it wasn't even wh…

I just don't think you can call that a real value prop if it's only for when the truck is stuck or a few minor edge cases. There are many scenarios where self-driving may not work or behave erratically so if their version of teleop doesn't solve those then not sure how Starsky argued they were ahead of competition. Additionally I think investors backed out primarily because of risks associated with operating an auton…

I feel that it covers an awful lot of them. If you cap teleop driving at 20km/h or something (or maybe a dynamic cap based on your rtt), that still covers all of the parking lot scenarios, as well many sensor-failure situations, like if you needed to crawl along in the right hand lane because it's a blizzard and the radar is blind.

In any case, the Forbes article specifically addresses how they modeled these things:

"Up ahead a deer jumps into the truck’s lane and hundreds of miles away a teleoperator is asked to take control of the vehicle. But they aren’t able to in time – either the deer jumped too quickly or the teleoperator wasn’t able to get situationally aware or worse yet: the cellular connectivity isn’t good enough!

Such was the situation painted to me time after time after time as CEO of Starsky Robotics, whose remote-assisted autonomous trucks were supposed to face exactly such a scenario. And yet, it was an entirely false scenario.

As I’ve written about before, safety doesn’t mean that everything always works perfectly, in fact it’s quite the opposite. To make a system safe is to intimately understand where, when, and how it will break and making sure that those failures are acceptable."

The fleet argument also confuses me; hasn't that been the Waymo/Uber pitch since forever, a centrally owned and managed fleet of autonomous vehicles for hire? Why would that be considered an especially risky direction?

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#46

But how can robots be used to harvest personal data? Maybe this is an end-use case.

It's the most effective Trojan horse if they actually succeed in general robotics.

Currently the amount of people using Google home is tiny. But imagine if you can just say "Google, make me a sandwich" and a few moments later the robot comes along.... And the automatic cleanup etc. People would buy them instantly, giving Google all the private data of households which would have never bought any of the current "smart assistants"

I'm pretty sure that household robotics is going to be the by far most profitable field if general robotics is ever achieved, as literally all households will want one, just like a washing machine.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#48
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/article/sudden-unexpected-demise-of-re... * Anki https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/con... * Jibo https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/jib... * Blue Workforce https://www.therobotreport.com/blue-workforce-robot-files-ba...…

Your conclusions are true, though I think it may be helpful to further subdivide into some categories as far as what the target market was and where they were at with technical readiness. Like, some of them (Anki, Jibo, Mayfield, Asimo, Reach) were 100% toys, and were always going to be at the extreme end price-wise trying to compete with increasingly "smart" toys being manufactured by regular toy companies with regu…

>They were never fast enough or reliable enough to be competitive with the minimum wage labour that they would have displaced

This probably sums up well. Human are extremely adaptable. To point if we are measured as 100 then no Robot is even 1.

There is a whole reason why even Foxconn gave up using Foxconn Robot, some task are just insanely easier and cheaper for a human to do it. They’re not easily automatable and even if we could the cost benefits doesn't make any sense.

So instead of having human plugging in DIMM RAM or M.2 SSD, now they are all soldered on the logic board using machines with automation.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with most pure-robotics-that-make-things[0] companies is that they end up finding out that they need to iterate on the robot while the actual product gets better . It's not like software where essentially everyone can use the same spreadsheet. It's "oh, I need this panel here to have a 3mm smaller gap" which works when you're Tesla, because the product is the company, but it doesn't really work when you're…

Missile robots are the best: you don't really need to worry much about supporting legacy products years after selling them to customers, and they are not expected to be functioning after just one use.

Sadly, not that easy.

> you don't really need to worry much about supporting legacy products years after selling them to customers

You really, really do. Missiles are expensive, and stay in inventories for a very long time, and they need to be made compatible with every update to every platform that can make use of them. That wouldn't be so bad, but then you also need to prove that they work with all those platforms. This is hard.

> they are not expected to be functioning after just one use.

Missiles are only fired once, but that doesn't mean they are used once. The typical "use" of an aircraft carried missile is that it is attached to a plane, powered up, and then the plane does a sortie and lands, and then the missile is removed and maintained. There is a lot of maintenance that is done to the missile daily.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#50
Billion dollar question: do you get more bang for the buck (return on investment, ROI) out of improving robot control schemes, or out of designing the product with automated assembly in mind?

Bonus: the ROI changes as you invest in either bucket.

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