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by fhub 152 days ago
The use case claimed here is (a) they can move around (b) they are "universal".

But

(a) Those things look like they need a wide berth to move around and flat terrain

(b) Those end effectors are far from universal. The payload weight seems so low that it even dropped an empty box at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIXjy2GWTg&t=150s
2 comments
imtringued 151 days ago
The weirdest part about the box carrying humanoids is that this problem has already been solved by fork lift style robots [0] which are being sold by many companies. When people talk about universality, having a central warehouse with movable pickup & place locations is all you need. The only thing that would be interesting is to build a universal loader/unloader that can take parts out of the boxes and insert them into machines factorio style, but that loader doesn't need to be humanoid and could instead just be put on a movable cart.

[0] https://www.hairobotics.com/products/haipick-a3

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bandrami 152 days ago
The bot may be notionally "universal" but will only operate on the DLC you buy from the robot rental company. Want it to wash dishes? That's the $20/mo dishwashing pack, or for one low price you can get the entire housework pack for only $80/mo.
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dyauspitr 151 days ago
It’s got to get good enough for open source versions at some point though.
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ben_w 151 days ago
Eventually, but consider the power envelope for compute in an android is 10-100x lower than for a car*, while at the same time the range of tasks a general purpose bot has to be good at is a strict superset of driving a car, and that open source attempts at self driving cars are far behind the proprietary attempts, and that compute efficiency is only doubling every 2.5-3 years (Koomey’s Law), so expect something like 20 years before these are properly general purpose and also not remote controlled.

Still plenty of value from special purpose and from remote control, but that's the timeline for solving both at the same time.

* even with the compute being external, the global electricity supply is presently a few hundred watts/capita and already being used for all the other things we want electricity for, hence all current anger about data centers making electricity too expensive, but renewables could tilt this to 8 billion robots with 1kW compute each in as little as 10 years if we brush aside all the decarbonisation efforts and keep burning petrol in cars and gas in stoves etc., otherwise more like 15 years for that.

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bandrami 151 days ago
That would shock me. These things are going to have a TPM
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