[mwambua]

My naive first reaction was that a unit like that would consume a way too much power to be practical on a robot, but then I remembered how many calories our own brains need vs the rest of our body (Google says 20% of total body needs).

Looks like power consumption for the Thor T5000 is between 30W-140W. The Unitree G1 (https://www.unitree.com/g1) has a 9Ah battery that lasts 2hrs under normal operation. Assuming an operating voltage of 48V (13s battery), that implies the robot's actuator and sensor power usage is ~216W.

Assuming average power usage is somewhere down the middle (85W), a thor unit would consume 28% of the robot's total power needs. This doesn't account for the fact that the robot would have to carry around the additional weight of the compute unit though. Can't say if that's good or bad, just interesting to see that it's in the same ballpark.

[bitwize]

The efficacy to weight ratio of meat vs. rocks and metal is freakin' absurd. We don't know how to build a robot that's as strong and damage-resistant as a human body and weighs only as much as one. Similarly we don't know how to build something as energy-efficient as a human brain that thinks anywhere near as well. Artificial superintelligence may well be a thing in the coming decades, but it will be profoundly energy-greedy; I fear the first thing it will resolve to do is secure fuel for itself by stealing our energy supplies like out of Superman III.

[xattt]

Can self-driving cars be framed as robots?

An electric car would have no issue sustaining this level of power; a gas-powered car doubly-so.

[AlotOfReading]

Autonomous vehicles are indeed robots, but they have power constraints (that Thor can reasonably fit within). Most industrial robots aren't meaningfully power constrained though.

It was a bit of a culture shock the first time I was involved with industrial robots because of how much power constraints had impacted the design of previous systems I worked on.

[worldsayshi]

I tried to look up human wattage as a comparison and I'm very surprised that it lands around the same ballpark. Around 145W as a daily average and around 440W as a an approximate hourly average during exercise.

I thought current gen robots would be an order of magnitude less efficient. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

[BobbyJo]

Electric motors are very energy efficient. I believe they are actually far more efficient on a per-joint movement basis, and the equivalence between us and them is largely due to inefficient locomotion.

Where we excel is energy storage. Far less weight, far higher density.

[themafia]

I happen to have an envelope handy:

2000 kilocalorie converts to 8.3 megajoules. This should be the amount of energy consumed per day.

8.3 megajoules / 24 hours is 96 watts. This should be the average rate of energy expediture.

96 watts * 20% is 19 watts. This should be the portion your brain uses out of that average.

96 watts * 24 hours is 464 watthours. This should be the average amount of energy your brain uses in a day.

This is why I've never found "AI" to be particularly competitive with human beings. The level of energy efficiency that our brains operate at is amazing. Our electrical and computer engineering is several orders of magnitude out from the achievements of nature and biology.

[ZiiS]

Calculate how much energy needs to be input into acriculture and transport to provide that wattage.

[themafia]

To be fair we'd have to consider how much of this same secondary energy would be required to build, operate and maintain the power grid. The grid itself is not 100% efficient either so we'd need to calculate how much power is directly wasted every single day just in inserting and extracting power from those overhead lines.

That's way off the envelope though.

[lm28469]

We do a whole lot of things a robot doesn't have to do, like filtering blood, digesting, keeping warm.

[worldsayshi]

Body maintenance.

[LtdJorge]

Every hardware piece of such a robot can do a few things. Our body parts do orders of magnitude more, including growing and regeneration.

[riku_iki]

> too much power to be practical on a robot

robot could be useful even when permanently plugged to the grid.

[tonyarkles]

From a UAV perspective, even at 140W it's not too bad. For a multi-rotor, that's about the same energy needed to lift around 750g-1kg of payload.

[amelius]

A robot working at an assembly line can be powered with a cable.