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RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

deepmind.com

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Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#41

Post by reaperman »

thelastparadise wrote: post #36
smoll wrote: post #35

When the operator was demonstrating "perturbations", they were reaching into the scene while the robot was very close to grabbing objects they had their fingers near - isn't this dangerous? What if the robot clamped down on their fingers?

> What if the robot clamped down on their fingers? Sometimes risk needs to be taken.

It’s easy to use tongs or other manipulators to interact with scene objects from a safe distance.

This isn’t demonstrating good robot safety, someone will get hurt, and likely already has been, at least to minor degrees.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#42

Post by lucubratory »

red75prime wrote: post #22
tomp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots becoming 100x cheaper, or humans becoming 100x more expensive.

> Robots becoming 100x cheaper That is DeepMind succeeding on building robots that can build robots.

Not sure how helpful that would be, I don't think most of the cost of robotics manufacturing is assembly. Precision machining would be part of it, as would actuators and batteries, all of which require their own specialised manufacturing chains that I doubt DeepMind can improve by an order of magnitude. And then of course there's the chips, which are very important and unlikely to drop in cost significantly from anything DeepMind can do. Of course your floor is the cost of materials, which is going to be based on labour and exchange value from mining and refining, particularly of lithium and aluminium, neither of which I think is particularly susceptible to any advances DeepMind is likely to make.

If someone from twenty years in the future appeared in my living room and informed me with certainty that robots are 100x cheaper in 2043 and asked me how that could be true, my first guess would be that there are significant energy breakthroughs making aluminium and lithium much cheaper as raw materials, and that robots took off as a very popular consumer product and are now sold in quantities between 100 million and 1 billion units every year, driving prices down through economies of scale. I'm not certain that would be enough on its own to get prices down that far, but it would be my best guess.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#44

Post by typon »

smoll wrote: post #35

When the operator was demonstrating "perturbations", they were reaching into the scene while the robot was very close to grabbing objects they had their fingers near - isn't this dangerous? What if the robot clamped down on their fingers?

This looks like a cobot (Collaborative robot). They are meant to work alongside humans - chance of injury is low because their speed/maximum force exerted is limited.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#45

Post by ChatGTP »

"Robots are quickly becoming part of our everyday lives"

Are they really?

This capability will help accelerate robotics research, as it reduces the need for human-supervised training, and is an important step towards creating a general-purpose robot.

The future people are striving to build just seems so fucking creepy to me. I don't really understand the enthusiasm for it. Maybe I would if I saw said future and maybe it would be awesome and I'd regret saying this, but right now, I just don't get it.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#46

Post by ChatGTP »

digdugdirk wrote: post #24
nomel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any obvious examples in mind?

Plenty of manufacturing environments that involve heavy items. Even with a lift assist, they'll still need 2-3 people to help lift or guide something to the next cell or next place in the line. Lift assists are still expensive, and if that could be replaced with a robotic arm and cut out 2-3 employees at the same time? There's going to be a big market for this. Certainly big enough to keep a company afloat while they…

So dropping heavy items 86% of the time is ok?

Sounds like a disaster?

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#47

Post by coryrc »

loandbehold wrote: post #15
tomp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots becoming 100x cheaper, or humans becoming 100x more expensive.

Unitree sells robot similar to Boston Dynamics Spot for $2700. If you add robotic gripper to it can do things like picking strawberries cheaper than minimum wage worker. Say if robot costs $3500 and minimum wage is $10/hour then robot needs to only complete 43 8-hour shifts over it's lifetime to displace human worker.

That won't work with rain or likely dirt or dust either. They do have a B1 which is shown forging water but it's $100k.

EDIT: page says that's not the real price, but https://www.ground.ghostysky.com/en/product/unitree-b1/ claims 70k€ so who knows.

Re: RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent

#49

Post by sashank_1509 »

aliljet wrote: post #7

I really really really want to play with robotics at home, but I've discovered it's super expensive to get things like robotic arms at home. Are there robotics platforms that are DIY ready? I really just want to teach a robotic arm to make my coffee in the morning. And I'll apply my life's effort to achieving this only if the cost of the robotics platform is stupid low. Yes. I know that's absurd. :)

My exact thought as you. I actually have done robotics research in Academia and I find it ridiculous that an arm costs as much as a car when it's just servos in series. I guess economies of scale.

Now that I'm leaving Academia I was trying to figure out how to get a robot arm so that I can continue doing stuff at home. I think an approach like the one here would be good: https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha.aspx. A single robot would cost 5k. You could also just buy Dynamixel servos and build it on your own, shouldn't be too hard with 3D printing ~ closer to 3.5 or 4k with that.

You could try to go cheaper by building a dynamixel servo on your own. I would not recommend this, the main difficulty is the controller which requires a lot of tuning, which is what you're paying for when you buy Dynamixel. But the raw parts of a servo are only around 50-100$ I'd guess.

Lastly any arm you build this way is going to be position control which is very different from the human arm that is torque controlled. Trying to get torque control on your arm is all the rage on Youtube these days, perhaps because the motion seems so lifelike. To do that you need to build a Quasi Direct Drive Actuator which is a BLDC servo with a low gear ratio and then try to centralize all the motors to reduce inertia. There is no accepted solution to do this, but the best results come from cable driven mechanisms like AmbiDex. Basically building a human like robot arm is a huge research problem on its own, and if you want to focus on intelligence best avoid this.

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