[ericmcer]

Giving it a narrow set of pre-programmed movements defeats the entire purpose of building a human shaped robot. The goal is for it to be general purpose. If they wanted to perform a single discrete task they could design a way more efficient machine for doing that task.

[Cyph0n]

The complexity involved - across hardware, sensors, and software - is mind boggling, even for this “dumb”, pre-programmed robot. So to me, it makes complete sense to build towards the ultimate goal in a gradual manner.

[colordrops]

You need to build basic skill primitives for the robot until it's no longer a mechanical problem, and just a software problem, which can be iterated on much more quickly and take advantage of mounds of ML/AI advances. Seems like they are getting close.

[93po]

Exactly. This demo is about the foundations of motor control and dexterity of human-like movements within a human form factor.

[alpaca128]

How else would you iterate towards a more general purpose robot? You have to start with narrow tasks. Humans are general purpose but we don't teach them to drive cars before they can walk.

[dahfizz]

But you could upload a new program of movements on the same hardware.

Requiring bespoke hardware for every possible task is like saying we shouldn't have CPUs - if you're gunna write a program, might as well put it on an FPGA.