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Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

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Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#51

Post by ac29 »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #46
michaelt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple matter of the number of motors you have. [1] Assume every motor has a 1% failure rate per year. A boring wheeled roomba has 3 motors. That's a 2.9% failure rate per year, and 8.6% failures over 3 years. Assume a humanoid robot has 43 motors. That gives you a 35% failure rate per year, and 73% over 3 years. That ain't good. And not only is the humanoid robot less reliable, it's also 14.3x the price - bec…

Would it be possible to reduce the failure rates?

The 1%/year failure rate appears to just be made up. There are plenty of electric motors that dont have anywhere near that failure rate (at least during the expected service life, failure rates certainly will probably hit 1%/year or higher eventually).

For example, do the motors in hard drives fail anywhere close to 1% a year in the first ~5 years? Backblaze data gives a total drive failure rate around 1% and I imagine most of those are not due to failure of motors.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#52

Post by fusionadvocate »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #32

I continued to be impressed how Google stealth releases fairly groundbreaking products, and then (usually) just kind of forgets about them. Rather than advertising blitz and flashy press events, they just do blog posts that tech heads circulate, forget about, and then wonder 3-4 years later "whatever happened to that?" This looks awesome. I look forward to someone else building a start-up on this and turning it into…

Because the whole purpose of these kinds of projects at Google is to keep regulators at bay. They don't need these products in the sense of making money from them. They will just burn some money and move on, exactly the way they did hundreds of times. But what kind of company has such a free pass to burning money? The kind of company that is a monopoly. Monopolies are THAT profitable.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#53

Post by bamboozled »

jagger27 wrote: post #35

These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it. On-device autonomy is the perfect foil to escape centralized authority and accountability. There’s no human behind the drone to charge for war crimes. It’s what they’ve always dreamed of. Who’s going to stop them? Who’s going to say no? The military contracts are too big to say no to, and they might not have a choice. The elimination of toil wil…

How would these things be competitive with drones on the battlefield? They probably cost the equivalent of 1000 autonomous drones and 100x the time and materials to make, way more power would be required to make them work too.

Terminator is a good movie but in reality, a cheap autonomous drone would mess one of those up pretty good.

I've seen some of the footage from Ukraine, drones are deadly, efficient, they are terrifying on the battlefield. Even though those robots will get crazy maneuverable, it's going to be pretty hard to out run an exploding drone.

Maybe the Terminators will have shotguns, but I could imagine 5 drones per terminator being a pretty easy to achieve considering they will be built by other autonomous robots.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#54

Post by michaelt »

ac29 wrote: post #51
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to reduce the failure rates?

The 1%/year failure rate appears to just be made up. There are plenty of electric motors that dont have anywhere near that failure rate (at least during the expected service life, failure rates certainly will probably hit 1%/year or higher eventually). For example, do the motors in hard drives fail anywhere close to 1% a year in the first ~5 years? Backblaze data gives a total drive failure rate around 1% and I imagi…

Yes, obviously that 1% figure is a simplification. Of course not all motors are created equal, and neither are all operating conditions!

But the neat thing about my argument is it holds true regardless of the underlying failure rate!

So long as your per-motor annual failure rate is >0, 43x it will be bigger than 3x it.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#55

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jagger27 wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it Of course they will. Practically everything useful has a military application. I'm not sure why this is considered a hot take.

The difference between this machine and the ones that came before is that there won’t have to be a human in the loop to execute mass murder.

> there won’t have to be a human in the loop to execute mass murder

This looks like an increasingly theoretical concern. (And probably always has been. Wars were far more brutal when folks fought face to face than they are today.)

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#56

Post by quantumHazer »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #45
polskibus wrote: post #44

What is the model architecture? I'm assuming it's far away from LLMs, but I'm curious about knowing more. Can anyone provide links that describe architectures for VLA?

Actually very close to one I'd say. It's a "visual language action" VLA model "built on the foundations of Gemini 2.0". As Gemini 2.0 has native language, audio and video support, I suspect it has been adapted to include native "action" data too, perhaps only on output fine-tuning rather than input/output at training stage (given its Gemini 2.0 foundation). Natively multimodal LLM's are basically brains.

> Natively multimodal LLM's are basically brains.

Absolutely not.

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#57

Post by bamboozled »

baron816 wrote: post #18

I’m optimistic about humanoid robotics, but I’m curious about the reliability issue. Biological limbs and hands are quite miraculous when you consider that they are able to constantly interact with the world, which entails some natural wear and tear, but then constantly heal themselves.

I'm interested how differences with robots work overtime, there are a lot of machines in this world that have been patched or "jimmied up" to continue working, let's say a mining robot, it would probably get quite heavily contaminated with dust, wear would occur in different places, rock falls might bend parts.

So even though another robot could probably do the "jimmy up". it seems like overtime, the robots will "drift" into all being a bit different.

Even commercial airlines seem to go through fairly unique repairs from things like collisions with objects, tail strikes etc.

Maybe it's just easier to recycle robots?

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#58

Post by bamboozled »

michaelt wrote: post #49
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to reduce the failure rates?

To an extent, yes. For example, an industrial robot arm with 6 motors achieves much higher reliability than a consumer roomba with 3 motors. They do this with more metal parts, more precision machining, much more generous design tolerances, and suchlike. Which they can afford by charging 100x as much per unit.

Also factory robots arms are probably operating in highly sterile, dry environments? How would working in a muddy / dusty / wet environment change this?

Re: Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices

#59

Post by gene-h »

baron816 wrote: post #18

I’m optimistic about humanoid robotics, but I’m curious about the reliability issue. Biological limbs and hands are quite miraculous when you consider that they are able to constantly interact with the world, which entails some natural wear and tear, but then constantly heal themselves.

Industrial robots at least are very reliable, MTBF is often upwards of 100,000 hours[0]. Industrial robots are optimized to be as reliable as possible because the longer they last and less often they need to be fixed, the more profitable they are. In fact, German and Japanese companies came to dominate the industrial robotics market because they focused on reliability. They developed rotary electric actuators that were more reliable. Cincinnati Millicron(US) was out competed in the industrial robot market because although their hydraulic robots were strong, they were less reliable.

I am personally a bit skeptical of anthropormophic hands achieving similarly high reliability. There's just too many small parts that need to withstand high forces.

[0]https://robotsdoneright.com/Articles/what-are-the-different-...

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