[wongarsu]

The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1].

I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good

1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515

[fragmede]

Economy of scale. This guy wanted a factory in China to do a custom run of a product where they didn't include the shell. It was cheaper to just buy 10,000 units and have a line to de-shell the items than it was to change the original line. That special purpose robot for the one task is going to get beat out by the general purpose robot thats being produced at 100x the volume.

[aDyslecticCrow]

> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot

An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ...

... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

[Philip-J-Fry]

I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems.

Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently.

This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools.

Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well.

"Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.

[aeternum]

There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems.

And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor.

Guess what won.

[iancmceachern]

As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks.

It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.

Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.

Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.

10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.

I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.

Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.

[542354234235]

It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Those are things that get, and will continue to get, cheaper every day.

[robocat]

> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots.

It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.

The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).

Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:

  Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing

[boppo1]

>We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand

Can you attach it to a humanoid body that isn't wired?

[iancmceachern]

Yes, but the two (software and hardware) scale very differently.

Once software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so.

Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy.

Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150.

The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.

[lugu]

Think about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.

[iancmceachern]

I dont follow

[tim333]

The nuts and bolts won't change much but the software/compute controlling the thing likely will.

[iancmceachern]

But the nuts and Bolts need to be paid for and manufactured for each robot. The software needs to be done once and then they can just click copy.

[smegger001]

Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.

[swiftcoder]

The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold

[lugu]

There isn't enough migrant to do all labor east asia will need as its population gets quickly older. Plus the societal aspiration of culture dissemination isn't there.

[fragmede]

The problem is that human immigrant labor is, well, human. Cost isn't the only metric being considered.

[superpope99]

have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!

[whartung]

Sure, but I have to launch the calculator, instead of just typing it into the ever present search bar of my persistent open browser.

If I could just type it into my shell, that would be nice. I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) to evaluate an equation, but then you get to play game with shell expansions and quotes.

In emacs I have to convolute the equation into prefix.

All minor stuff but it adds up.

[timschmidt]

> I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made)

bc

https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html

[anentropic]

From the demo videos on the site... it seems now that people have dishwashers they want a robot to load the dishwasher for them

[spopejoy]

That's not that weird, even if it is pretty pathetic. I don't understand it now but I used to dread "doing the dishes" when I was younger even though it was 95% just filling a dishwasher. Laziness drives technology an awful lot, at least from a product POV.

[plastic3169]

This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.

[spopejoy]

> LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects

Or the often-trumpeted "I had Claude do a killer refactor" that an IDE can do locally for zero power faster and 100% reliably

[rowanG077]

Isn't the entire point that LLMs are unreasonably better at even specific things that you would naively think a purpose build system would be good at.

[aDyslecticCrow]

Could you name an example aside rephrasing text?

[rowanG077]

Considering the entire thing is a text generator it's quite a statement to exclude that. Text is a huge world. Math, programming, stories, chatting, mail, search, website navigation, most things you want to do in the digital space involves text.

[93po]

I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.

[spopejoy]

We're so far from that though. Even if we magically jump over the failure rates we're discussing here, the safety considerations seem to be far worse. These things are heavy and dangerous, c.f. Rodney Brooks' "never follow a robot up stairs" https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-...

[blackguardx]

Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?

[xky]

If humanoid robots can perform ok on a broader set of tasks then they could reach economies of scale that a robot arm might not.

[aerostable_slug]

To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling.

It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper.

Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.

[sneak]

Once it’s able to weld and climb then building skyscrapers will become a lot easier and cheaper as you don’t need safety equipment for them.

[numpad0]

There are couple UR5 single arm cobots on eBay at $5.5k each right at this moment. The truth is that the value of humanoid is in it form, the novelty, the sense of accomplishment, not features.

[metal_am]

If you found one for that price with the controller and pendent, please send me a link. I’ve looked a lot and have not seen any UR for remotely that cheap.

[93po]

because they already are. an industrial arm from ABB is frequently over $100k. add in the cost to fit it with specialty equipment like vacuum suction for handling boxes, made by a small to medium size business, they'd probably charge another $50k. and if it breaks you need specialty mechanics and parts.

in a world with 500 million humanoid robots, parts are plentiful, theyre easier to work on due to not weighing 5000 pounds, and like the other person said, economies of scale

[kevin_thibedeau]

> one-time robot purchase.

With a hefty subscription to make it do anything useful.

[timschmidt]

I can already run the Qwen3 VL multimodal model for text, image processing, and speech recognition and generation on a well spec'd home workstation.

And the Unitree R1 already only costs $6k.

All the necessary pieces are aligning, very rapidly, and as James Burke has pointed out, that's when Connections happen.

[serf]

the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy. it's like positing about the future of robotics by looking at a sumo bot.

what it IS , however, is a remarkable achievement of commoditization; getting a toy like that with those kind of motors would have been prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the world; but much like the Chinese 20k EV, it's not really a reliable marker for the actual future; in fact bottomed out pricing is more-so an indicator of the phase of industrialization that country is in.

[timschmidt]

> the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy

Only because it's not yet attached to a reasonable AI, which is my point. It's not going to do any heavy lifting, but it could easily do basic house chores like cleaning up, folding laundry, etc if it were. The actuators and body platform are there, and economies of scale already at work.

I guess some folks just can't or won't put 2 and 2 together to predict the near future.

[aDyslecticCrow]

Why are you comparing LLMs with robotics? What makes you think they are even remotely related problem sets?

[phs318u]

With humans, we call that subscription a salary.

[whatever1]

Of course it does not. We just add scanners in up down left and right of the conveyor. Never touching the package.

[bjoli]

This was my solution as well. Why even have a robot? Give me a conveyor belt, some cameras and a moderately powerful SBC and I think I could probably manage a system that does one package a second with a fallback for humans to process what can't be processed by the machine.

[aDyslecticCrow]

The Boston robot is for packing boxes on and off the conveyor; like a transport car. And it helps having a few degrees of freedom to do that effectively.

If it's just checking or adding labels, it's silly to even use that.