A team of humanoid robots is working collaboratively at a car factory in China
According to their developer UBTech Robotics, this marks the world's first multi-humanoid robot collaboration across multiple scenarios and tasks
I always find it silly how humanoid robots almost never turn in a way that looks easy. They do a small shuffle and it takes multiple steps to turn 90 degrees.
I guessing that it's not a trivial problem to solve. Or maybe there are hardware limitations that don't allow human like movements. Like, maybe the hip and leg sockets are not able to make certain motions. Otherwise, it's something that could easily be solved through reinforcement learning. Maybe it's just never been a priority either.
I know that from an economic perspective, having a robot that can do a human task slowly but for less than it takes to hire a human for a proportional amount of time makes sense. And if we want to reduce mundane human working hours under socialism, it makes sense to build these sorts of robots. Especially as their abilities increase (more dexterity, better sensors, better software, etc.). Right now they feel super gimicky, but I can see the potential.
That bit at the end where the one bot charged the other bot was kind of cute.
I notice that as well, some of the movements just seem awkward. Interestingly, this has been the case for a long time too now. Once in a while you see very fluid motion from Boston Dynamics or UniTree, but it's always in demos where it's mostly scripted. Whenever you see robots operating in the wild it's always very slow and stuttered motion. I'm guessing the control systems are just not reliable enough to guarantee that the robot recover from losing balance, and it makes sense to just have them work slow and steady with minimal risk of accidents. I also expect that as the use of such robots becomes more prevalent, control systems will improve as well and they will be able to move similarly to humans.
Another aspect of it is sensors. Humans have skin, and we can immediately tell when we come in contact with an object. It's a trickier problem for a robot though since they mostly rely on visual or lidar data. I expect artificial skin and proprioception likely to be the next big innovations in robotics. If a robot is able to know the position of its body relative to the environment with a high degree of confidence, and able to sense the environment with its body, then it can move a lot more safely and reliably.
I don't understand. What is the point of these humanoid robots? Why are they suddenly all the rage? It just seems so inefficient compared to industrial robots and machines we already have.
The appeal is that it's a single robot that can do many different tasks based on the need, and directly work in spaced designed for humans. It's the universality of it that's the real benefit. With industrial robots, you have to design a robot for each specific task, and then it can only do that one task. This makes sense for factories that build a specific type of thing, and it's more efficient in that context. However, if you want a tool that can do many different tasks, then a humanoid design makes a lot of sense.
And now that the cost of these robots is becoming very cheap, I think UniTree sells them for something like 18k now, it's cheaper to just grab one of these general purpose robots and get it to do what you want than to design one from scratch.
Is there data on the power draw and maintenance aspect? Looking at these I feel like this is something that's gonna need fixing all the time (due to all the moving parts) and having more than a small amount will be highly inefficient in terms of space and power. I imagine they are able to recharge themselves though so you don't have to worry about that.
I guess it's because humanoid robots can work in the for-humans facilities we already have while other types of robots would necessitate the facilities to be heavily modified or redone to be able to work in them. Also, if the robots fail they can get humans to fill in instead of having to stop production until the problem is fixed.
Yeah, I've been wondering this as well. It makes so little sense but I'm guessing it just makes for shiny propaganda. I was never convinced by the argument that "Humanoid robots are better suited to working in environments that were built for humans", like, WE are the ones who make these environments, wouldn't it just make more sense to rebuild the facility to be more efficient for cheaper and more sensible machinery, rather than invest exponentially more to replace all the humans with robots?
It's like saying "Cars were designed with humans in mind, so if we want self driving cars we need to put a humanoid robot driver in the drivers seat".
wouldn’t it just make more sense to rebuild the facility to be more efficient for cheaper and more sensible machinery
Yes, but that takes time and we need to have a good and mature enough tecnology for it to make at least some "financial" sense. So, if the humanoid robots can do work that humans can do then it means that we could try make/have AIs make new robots and new enviroments that work well toghether without consideration for human form.
Basically, from the first factory robots half a century ago until a few years back there wasn't that much of an advance that could allow robots to work alone in anything but a few cases. Now though the technology that allows for humanoid robots is the technology that allows non humanoid robots to work a lot better in basically all cases, so we will finally begin seeing more and more robots and infrastructure being built to take advantage of the new advances, at the same time we'll also get humanoid robots for other tasks, like some of the ones that involve working closelly with people...
I was never convinced by the argument that “Humanoid robots are better suited to working in environments that were built for humans”, like, WE are the ones who make these environments
And they aren't built for free so they were built to work, and now that the technology is allowing some of that to change it will gradually change.
Well that's not terrifying at ALL.
