[numpad0]

I don't see why that would be so hard. This is potentially easier than reliably shooting guns at people.

That machine will look like a bean bag couch in rough shape of a giant human hand, with few of cooperative work robotic arms. The couch part hugs and secures all limbs of the baby to into the party escort submission position, then the cobots move in to find the disassembly markers on the diaper to tear it open to remove it. Then a showerhead, then a hair dryer, then baby powder sprayer can be brought out and ran to clean any residues and take care of rashes. Finally, the new diaper can be brought in, baby wrapped, and the double sided tapes on it lightly pressed on to secure it.

The entire machine would probably cost less than 10 million USD per unit if mass produced at reasonable scales, and most technological elements needed in such machines would be readily available.

[vessenes]

How many diapers have you changed, out of curiosity? I've changed maybe 5,000 diapers (4 kids non-primary caregiver), and I feel confident that a shower head + hair dryer is not going to be safe or in fact work at all in many circumstances.

[numpad0]

Never actually... I think the key for the machine is to secure the baby in such ways that the pelvis stays at the same position in space, without breaking bones or tearing muscles. That's normally not possible because a human hand isn't big enough and grippy enough to hold them that way, and that allows the baby to slip out or wiggle around. But if you could, and if the I-shaped types of diapers are tolerated, then the problem reduces into the matter of washing the bottom floating in space and wrapping them with the diapers. Legs can probably be kept out of the way by some cushions.

[vessenes]

Definitely recommend you do a few days of market research before you start the robot design

[dmoy]

> washing the bottom

What about washing all the other places where baby's poop can get? (Legs, feet, hands, arms with some difficulty, all the way up the back, etc)

[eru]

Showerhead can still do that.

You can pretty much put water everywhere on a human body, as long as you make sure that they can still breath.

Legs and arms and the back etc are fairly trivial to clean with a showerhead. Skinfolds are where I would expect problems.

Btw, your system doesn't need to handle all corner cases of cleaning to be useful. It needs to not hurt anyone (in all cases); handle most common cases of cleaning; and ideally alert you when it can't clean some spots.

But even a system that can't alert you is still useful for a parent, because the parent can still look over the child afterwards.

[monknomo]

do you have any idea how many folds a baby has, and how much poop they can hide in them?

[eru]

I have a daughter and never had much trouble getting the poop off her.

But perhaps sons are worse?

[temp_praneshp]

> This is potentially easier than reliably shooting guns at people.

I suspect the shooting guns robots will be used against populations the owner considers sub-human, and reliability (accuracy in this context) is not a concern as long as it doesn't turn around 180degs.

[eru]

You know they are adding AI to drones fighting in Ukraine (on both sides). Mostly to deal with signalling scamming that prevents remote operators from controlling the drone.

Whether you consider your opponent in a war sub-human or not is completely irrelevant to all the engineering problems you have to solve here.

Reliability is absolutely important, because you want that opposing tank or helicopter or soldier etc to no longer be opposing you. (But, of course, reliability is only one aspect, and engineers make lots and lots of trade-offs.)

What context do you have in mind where you need a robot to shoot people?