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Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

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Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#81

Post by fennecfoxy »

heisenzombie wrote: post #65
shireboy wrote: post #62

Maybe dumb question: One of the use cases is instrument reading of analog instruments. My brain immediately goes to "this should have some sensor sending data, and not be analog". Is having a robot dog read analog sensors really a better fit in some cases?

It bears really thinking through the alternative: So we're going to have some engineers specify suitable digital replacements given the process/environment/safety requirements. We'll procure those (noting that an industrial digital pressure transducer can easily push up towards $10k), schedule a plant shutdown (how much does that cost?), then pay a pipefitter/boilermaker to replace the old gauges with new pressure tr…

I think the thing is: does it need to last 20-30 years between replacements if a robot can easily replace it + they're cheap enough to add redundant ones. Do we really need crazy accuracy even on an industrial level...like this pipe will burst at 200psi so the gauge needs to be accurate to 0.001 psi so we can sound the alarm when it hits 199.999 psi somehow I don't think so.

Dumb silicon is so super cheap now, just look to nfc etc, 1c microcontrollers. We can litter our world with sensors.

Which I would love to see - but I'm also not discounting the usefulness of any robot just being able to read something we can read and vice versa.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#82

Post by fennecfoxy »

Glemllksdf wrote: post #77
shireboy wrote: post #62

Maybe dumb question: One of the use cases is instrument reading of analog instruments. My brain immediately goes to "this should have some sensor sending data, and not be analog". Is having a robot dog read analog sensors really a better fit in some cases?

Having a IoT system working flawlessly across all devices you own, would be great right? Like your washing machine reporting its state, knowing if sun is out, running only when there is a lot of sun. Your bsement heater sending out its stats. And your industry machine doing the same thing. Then you realize that we are talking about industry 4.0 for a decade now, everything IoT is either closed source or always costs…

Honestly? Because capitalism.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#83

Post by fennecfoxy »

mt_ wrote: post #42

Is there a open source mini robot kit that allows me to play-around with agentic robots?

Waveshare has some pretty rad ones. I've been tempted to use one of their rovers for something.

Be careful, because you can easily overpay out the ass for "robot kits" online.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#84

Post by fennecfoxy »

I feel like this is a political move between Hyundai and Google (favour by Google).

BD sat back on traditional programming/light ML techniques for ages whilst transformers went wild and it's only now that they're like "oh shit".

Hence the partnership with Google; BD lacks the capabilities otherwise. I bet their internal marketing departments did a bit of hand shaking to spin this piece as a favour for Hyundai/BD. Because from Google's (and our) perspectives - reading a gauge etc isn't that impressive and multimodal transformers solved that years ago, OpenCV many years before that also. But to BD it's impressive/a desperate grasp of "we swear we're using modern ML now! Yes our robot dances were sequenced and took dozens of takes but now we'll start doing it for real, we swear!"

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#85

Post by hootz »

tootie wrote: post #67
hootz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is when the world was made to interface with us. We can't use robots for everything if they aren't emulating us, because we would have to adapt everything for the non-humanlike robots.

We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything. There's no reason a robot traveling over smooth surface should have legs instead of wheels or treads. There's no reason to have a head. Some kind of arm is a common design feature, but certainly no reason to have two. No reason to be symmetrical. A domestic robot may be constraine…

The human form is not optimal, but it is general. When we want a general AI for all kinds of work, we can look to humans as inspiration, as we can do all the kinds of work we need, even if it is not optimal.

Of course, optimal robots will be useful, like ultimate roombas for cleaning floors or something like that, they will work better than humanoid robots for sure.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#86

Post by pstuart »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #79
pstuart wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fascinating proposition and no doubt they'll get bigger models in there, and likely be able to cluster multiple models for mega MOE. One thing that would really be great is if they could take the power requirements down -- the chip requires 2.5KW, which is modest in terms of what the big boys use but would be an issue on a battery powered robot.

"The chip" no, a whole rack/deployment they offer takes 2.5kW. Not just one chip. Squeezing 2.5kW thru 1 chip would be mental.

My bad, thanks for the correction. Skimming FTL.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#87

Post by tootie »

famouswaffles wrote: post #75
tootie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything. There's no reason a robot traveling over smooth surface should have legs instead of wheels or treads. There's no reason to have a head. Some kind of arm is a common design feature, but certainly no reason to have two. No reason to be symmetrical. A domestic robot may be constraine…

>We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything. We build just about everything we expect to interact with against the constraints of the human form, not just living spaces. And yes we because we built those spaces for the human body, the human body is by definition the optimal choice. >There's no reason a robot traveling over…

When we built self-driving cars, did we put a humanoid robot in the driver's seat? No. We put sensors on the car's perimeter and plugged in to the existing electronics. Forget "fits in human spaces" and think about an actual task you'd trust a robot to do for you before it's battery runs out. And who says you need one generalist? I have 5 different automated kitchen machines right now and they are all various types of rectangular prisms. I have a robot floor cleaner and it's a disc on wheels. I'd sooner have a kitchen robot that's on a rail bolted to the ceiling and connected to mains power.

This is a terribly contrived demo and not really realistic, but it illustrates my point. It's a bathroom-cleaning robot and it's kinda what I described. R2D2 with arms coming out of it's head. It's roughly human-scaled, but not at all humanoid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1q9y5wh/toilet_cl...

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#88

Post by famouswaffles »

tootie wrote: post #87
famouswaffles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything. We build just about everything we expect to interact with against the constraints of the human form, not just living spaces. And yes we because we built those spaces for the human body, the human body is by definition the optimal choice. >There's no reason a robot traveling over…

When we built self-driving cars, did we put a humanoid robot in the driver's seat? No. We put sensors on the car's perimeter and plugged in to the existing electronics. Forget "fits in human spaces" and think about an actual task you'd trust a robot to do for you before it's battery runs out. And who says you need one generalist? I have 5 different automated kitchen machines right now and they are all various types o…

[dead]

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#89

Post by solatic »

culi wrote: post #31
vibe42 wrote: post #21

A parcel of land. A few robot legs and arms, big battery, off-the-shelf GPU. Solar panels. Prompt: "Take care of all this land within its limits and grow some veggies."

What if it turns out that "take care of this land" means the traditional way California was taken care of with regular small slow burns. After over 10k years of this type of management there are many important native species that won't even germinate without the presence of ash. Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionall…

Your point isn't contrary to LLMs or LLM-powered robotics. LLMs have access to the entire human corpus, including documented regional specializations, as you describe. The LLM knows via sensors where it is and what local conditions are. The LLM could even hypothetically conduct experiments to try to find further hyper-local specializations, instead of just relying on monocrop agriculture.

It all depends on the agent harness and the system prompts.

Re: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

#90

Post by hadsed »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #84

I feel like this is a political move between Hyundai and Google (favour by Google). BD sat back on traditional programming/light ML techniques for ages whilst transformers went wild and it's only now that they're like "oh shit". Hence the partnership with Google; BD lacks the capabilities otherwise. I bet their internal marketing departments did a bit of hand shaking to spin this piece as a favour for Hyundai/BD. Bec…

This is just way too cynical

There's an exceptional amount of work to get a transformer to learn such a thing from scratch even if you had data from all the different cameras and basements and lighting conditions out there. Mentioning opencv is just silly

The entire point is that robotics lives in the full complexity of the real world and therefore cannot afford to do all that for every little corner of every factory, engine room, warehouse, aircraft, etc.

Robots are finally using ML because ML is finally useful!

The gauge is an excellent example partly because of its mundanity. There's a huge number of these little tasks everywhere in real environments. It does an incredible job at adapting to the specifics of its camera resolution, lighting, and the gauge labels to do the task.

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