[hadsed]

This is just way too cynical

There's an exceptional amount of work to get a transformer to learn such a thing from scratch even if you had data from all the different cameras and basements and lighting conditions out there. Mentioning opencv is just silly

The entire point is that robotics lives in the full complexity of the real world and therefore cannot afford to do all that for every little corner of every factory, engine room, warehouse, aircraft, etc.

Robots are finally using ML because ML is finally useful!

The gauge is an excellent example partly because of its mundanity. There's a huge number of these little tasks everywhere in real environments. It does an incredible job at adapting to the specifics of its camera resolution, lighting, and the gauge labels to do the task.