51–60 of 118 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Belaying a climber would be a hilarious (and fraught) gold medal challenge.
There are already robots that do that (autobelayers)...
Auto belay device can't hold the climber up on the wall, like human belayer can, so that climber can rest and try again.
Auto belay device can't do lead belay.
Think about how fast progress is being made now. When I was a kid in the early 2000s we would see some basic robot progress on movements (almost always from Boston Dynamics or sometimes China) and we thought it was incredible. Robot dogs running was amazing and five or so years later a backflip blew our minds. Those robots were specially designed and didn't look humanoid. Now we have bi-pedal humanoid robots and they…
1. Force. Walking, running, fighting, doing backflips, etc. all allow for large amounts of force, without a lot of dynamic precision required. Many common tasks require precise and dynamic force. E.g. for washing a window, pushing too hard breaks the glass while pushing too softly will leave streaks.
2. Environment interaction. Most reliable humanoid robots do minimal environment interaction beyond self-balancing. They walk/run/jump in environments that are largely open, with usually convex blocky obstacles. The real world has lots of tasks that require processing beyond low-resolution maps of solid/open space. E.g. I'd want to see a robot that can walk through a forest: jumping/stepping over thin branches that are hard to see, ducking under fallen logs, pushing though bendy branches without breaking them, avoiding ground that is muddy, and seeing through the current obstacle to determine if the obstacle beyond is traversable.
Just to reiterate, I don't see fast progress being made on doing these tasks reliably. It's easy to show 1/N success rate, and much much harder to show ~N/N success rate on these dynamic tasks.
Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its diaper, with everything that entails: identifying and eliminating all traces of waste from all crevices, applying diaper cream as necessary, unfolding and positioning the new diaper correctly and quickly, always using enough but never too m…
> It would require an entirely different kind of robotics. I was 100% with you until suddenly this technical claim pops out. You might feel this way, and might be right, but why ? Changing a diaper is crazy hard, I absolutely agree, but you seem to be just declaring from vibes that we 'require an entirely different kind of robotics'. Can you put your finger on why this is true? Not nitpicking for the fun of it - I'm…
But can this be done with baby skin and lung safe chemicals at a reasonable temperature?
Point being humanoid designs for robots that manipulate objects designed for humans are an artificially hard problem we have decided to fail at solving.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course, your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough…
> but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years This is wildly optimistic. I quit working in robotics because I got tired of all the bullshit promises everybody made all the time. I'm not saying robotics isn't advancing or the work is unimportant, but the spokespeople are about as reliable as Musk when it comes to timelines. I doubt it will happen in 10 years, even with a constrained environment…
Hey Hacker News. Curious if folks feel like I'm missing categories of challenge.
Can I say something: could you all please stop inserting contaminated tool back into a jar of food? You use a clean tool to take out the amount you eat, and that's it. You can put it back if the tool had touched nothing but: air, the food in the jar, and your hand at the operating end. Otherwise, that butter knife stays on your dish for the rest of the meal. The exception would be if you cleaned the tool, like bare m…
Bacteria can do a number on people... Kept telling the wife to not cross contaminate jars, and other products. But you know, she knows better...
Wife was eating some fish in can, puts spoon back (with lovely saliva bacteria), puts in fridge "i wil eat tomorrow", 2 days later she eats the leftover.
She enjoyed a hour+ of "fun" muscles contracting stomach cramps to the point it was almost hospital time. Learned her lesson, well, ... for fish.
Its always like "but i do not like to keep using fresh utensils". I am always: "the dishwasher does not care if it 20 or 40 utensils". Its the same amount of wash and cost. So stop trying to recycle utensils!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course, your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough…
> your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. Um, no it's not. Is absolutely zero tolerance. There is not weasel words out of this. If a robot was to cause any pain to the baby, there would be no remorse. There would be no front of mind thoughts to not repeat the same thing the next time. There would be no guilt for causing pain to the baby. Why you would "basically" this the way you have is disturbing.
Granted most of this is unintentional. The same about injuries by robots - we're supposedly talking about unintentional injuries here. So, if robots save money/time/effort (like Flint water switch) i'm not sure that the society would suddenly change its current approach to unintentional baby injuries and implement zero tolerance.
To illustrate - Uber self-driving killed a woman, and another self-driving maimed a woman in SF. Uber case was an obvious criminal gross negligence running with explicitly disabled emergency braking), and the company wiggled out of it in part by having to shut down the self-driving. Where is in SF it was an obvious case of technology limitations and teething issue, so there were no real severe consequences as we're much more tolerant to honest technological accidents (at least when they happen not to us personally).
Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its diaper, with everything that entails: identifying and eliminating all traces of waste from all crevices, applying diaper cream as necessary, unfolding and positioning the new diaper correctly and quickly, always using enough but never too m…
That machine will look like a bean bag couch in rough shape of a giant human hand, with few of cooperative work robotic arms. The couch part hugs and secures all limbs of the baby to into the party escort submission position, then the cobots move in to find the disassembly markers on the diaper to tear it open to remove it. Then a showerhead, then a hair dryer, then baby powder sprayer can be brought out and ran to clean any residues and take care of rashes. Finally, the new diaper can be brought in, baby wrapped, and the double sided tapes on it lightly pressed on to secure it.
The entire machine would probably cost less than 10 million USD per unit if mass produced at reasonable scales, and most technological elements needed in such machines would be readily available.
Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its diaper, with everything that entails: identifying and eliminating all traces of waste from all crevices, applying diaper cream as necessary, unfolding and positioning the new diaper correctly and quickly, always using enough but never too m…
> It would require an entirely different kind of robotics. I was 100% with you until suddenly this technical claim pops out. You might feel this way, and might be right, but why ? Changing a diaper is crazy hard, I absolutely agree, but you seem to be just declaring from vibes that we 'require an entirely different kind of robotics'. Can you put your finger on why this is true? Not nitpicking for the fun of it - I'm…
Meanwhile it must also be strong enough to move and restrain a range of infants which is a level of force capable of harm without any possibility to fail deadly.