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Comment by elsewhen | Hacker News Reader

an autonomous robot can go swap out it's own batteries, or go charge itself. if it can operate for 24 hours a day, losing ~5% of that time for battery swapping is not that significant.

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Depends on what you're using it for. The Boston Dynamics jobbies were intended for search and rescue, or accompanying soldiers on foot; they'd need to go for hours or days without access to resupply.

My point was just that this thing isn't quiet because of better engineering, it's quiet because it's made for a different job.

agreed that it is designed for a different job. but those different jobs are likely to represent a huge percentage of the market (home, office and factory environments). i dont think that in these settings a relatively short battery life will be "regrettable" at all. as i mentioned above, swapping batteries is an easy solution to the problem.

Every "autonomous" robot gets a swarm of battery bringers?

They day we defeat skynet, we shall have our Flyswatter ready..

i think you are overcomplicating my point. when cordless drills came out, people who were used to corded drills, laughed that you would get stuck mid-job without power. nowadays, most cordless drills come with two removable batteries. you charge one while you are using one. when the battery runs out, you just swap them. it takes a few seconds, you get the advantage of cordlessness, and effectively they function all day long under heavy usage.

sure, for military applications, boston dynamics approach is likely more suitable. but for factory, office and home usage, swapping out batteries shouldn't be a significant problem at all.

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