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by dcmatt 611 days ago
Still amazing progress! Such a shame that Sony and Honda gave up on their bipedal robots 20 years ago. Imagine where we could've been
2 comments

They gave up because those types of robots are mostly pointless.

You're better off with job specific designs like what Boston Dynamics does.

None of those bots ever made it out of the lab or controlled stage presences. They were never pointless. They gave up for the same reason many people gave up on AI multiple times over the last 70 years. The compute wasn't there and the techniques were too manual. They were literally the meme of the miner giving up just before he strikes a diamond. Honda retired Asimo in 2017, the same year Google published "Attention Is All You Need".
Robots are everywhere from vacuum cleaners to manufacturing.

The fact that companies haven't been rushing to produce humanoid versions should tell you everything about their usefulness.

It tells you about the difficulty of creating humanoid robots. Humans are extremely dexterous and agile creatures and it is an extremely challenging engineering task to produce humanoid robots.
> Imagine where we could've been

Where?