[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.