[TaylorAlexander]

Agree. I work in robotics and we never have enough compute. I want to see us get to the point where the most advanced robot ever has all the compute it needs onboard, and that means huge growth in compute density and efficiency are needed.

[ben_w]

That's genuinely surprising.

What sort of on-board compute do you typically have today?

[RugnirViking]

a common example from my robotics experience (mainly mobile robots) has been getting something powerful enough to run our image recognition/interpreting sensor data. We often have something like several microprocessors (think:arduino equivalent running c++ or c) which run all the motor control etc and a high level system (used to often be raspberry pi, now more often nvidia jetson nano) listening to all of those and using most of it's computing power on some kind of sensor data, usually image recognition or processing TOF camera/lidar/radar data etc. We often have to optimise hard to get a couple of cycles or "frames" per second with these, which really puts limitations on how robots respond (250ms delay is veeeery noticable, especially if it's in obstacle avoidance - relatively common)

[zamnos]

Limiting ourselves to onboard compute available on mobile robots is one thing, but even for fixed installation robots, aka an arm in a factory where space and power aren't limited, we're very much still limited by compute capacity. Trying to use robots to do something as simple as folding clothes still cannot be done at a reasonable speed. Yeah, on a personal level, just buck up and spend the 20 minutes folding your clothes, or hire a maid to do it for you, but the complexity of automating the task of folding clothes by a robot is a stand in for other tasks in industry that we still can't automate because the complexity is still too high for our current computing power, and have to hire a human for.

Researchers at US Berkeley came out with the algorithm they named SpeedFolding in October of last year. Watch https://youtu.be/UTMT2WAUlRw?t=511 and then realize that linked excerpt is sped up 9x.

If we had 9x faster compute we could have laundry folding robots which is one thing, but that amount of compute would enable robots to do tons more tasks in industry.

[mlsu]

Robotics is a double whammy, you have compute problems but you also have actuation.

Getting robots to move quickly is easy; getting them to move quickly to exactly where you want them, or with exactly as much force... that is much, much more difficult. Double for mobile robots where you don't have a good energy source. If cost is an issue that is another dimension -- powerful and accurate actuators are extremely expensive.

[bick_nyers]

I don't work in the field but just to kind of put it into perspective, a 12v 100A LiFePO4 battery has 1200 Watts capacity and weighs 30 pounds. A typical gaming PC (which to be fair, is more willing to trade power for performance) consumes about 600 Watts per hour. Problem for a Tesla? Not so much. Problem for a lightweight drone? Definitely.

[idiotsecant]

ahhh the units in this post are making my eye twitch.

[imtringued]

I would be mad too, if my gaming PC was demanding 300 Watts of power but it took half an hour to ramp up ;)

[bick_nyers]

I know Watts per hour is not the right way to phrase it but I feel it helps for those that don't know. Also, I just don't like saying Amp. Hours :)

[idiotsecant]

Watts per hour implies watts/hour. Watt-hour implies a number of watts multiplied by a length of time. Also known as energy. Watts are power. Watt hours are energy. Two different things. Watts/hour is nothing.

[slaw]

Watt/hour is speed of power. It doesn't make any sense.

[TaylorAlexander]

The NVIDIA Jetson boards are popular, but even with a full desktop processor and state of the art GPU, you can easily down them in data from a LIDAR sensor or a few cameras. Especially since robots may also need fast response times.

There is another reply to your comment that shares a lot of what I have experienced. You have so many pieces of code that need to run and a good handful of them are working on something like LIDAR point clouds with a million 3D points in them, plus some cameras running several different image recognition and segmentation algorithms, and you want to have fast cycle times, it just all adds up. Every serious robot I have ever worked on is maxing out its system, even ones at Google X with a full desktop CPU, a high end NVIDIA graphics card, and a couple secondary ARM CPUs.

[ben_w]

Thanks! :)

That definitely helps me understand why the footage of the robots in this video had to be sped up: https://youtu.be/Ybk8hxKeMYQ