Japan's most valuable startup aims to teach factory robots to think

more progress coming soon. You aint see nothing yet ;)

That suction arm/grabber is Alien Queen level uncomfortable. I love it.

That's probably good enough for 80% of what Amazon sells. Big layoffs coming.

That looks largely similar to Ocado's solution that gets trotted out at trade shows. Kinect V2 coupled with a suction-based system. The difference here is the gripper. Their rep said that they found that suction works reliably and provides good grasp detection (e.g. loss of suction).

It's worth pointing out that this capability solves the problem of moving an arbitrary object from A to B. That's really not that hard with a suction cup. All you have to do - and this is how Ocado solve it, from my reading of the presentation - is locate a mostly-planar surface in your point cloud and suck it. All that changes in this case is the gripper closes to hold the part in. Bing - it works if you have no idea what the part is, beyond some basic constraints like size or weight. You don't need to worry about 'correct grasps' or anything like that.

What it doesn't solve is picking up a part precisely from a bin/tray and in a known orientation. That second problem crops up in manufacturing all the time.

Because it does not sell

It scares me.

I think about that what Musk said about Robots. He said, 'In the future, we will need a strobe scope to see robots'.

Automation scares me more than my state requiring me to buy insurance for my jalopy? (Insurance that seems like the price was colluded, but I will never be able to prove it. And that's second to the clever way the Insurance industry brainwashed us, and our legislatures.)

I'm a chit job guy.

I'm usually the guy with two lousy jobs, and the lousy jobs are slowly being eliminated by machines. Or, being filled by immigrants who wouldn't think about rocking the boat at their new career. People just happy to be alive? I get it.

I get it, but this used to be America. We knew we were a bit spoiled, but very greatful we were born here too.

People are clamoring over this great current economy.

Yes--I see a lot of tech guys driving new cars, and very satisfied in life. Well except the rent? I just see so many people with jobs that are a few years of being irrelevant. And yes--many will be tech. On a personal note, I know three homeless people. Two were former Programmers.

The chit jobs, including construction, will always be there, but they are paying less, and less, while expecting more. Yes--Mike Rowe I'll move to the middle of the country for a six month welding gig, usually tied to some natural resource that's hot.

The chit jobs I'm looking at are really getting bad.

Uber always poops up. Yea--I'm going to buy a Uber approved vechicle, and drive at their whim. It's like they pride thenselfs over screwing over a potential employee?

What I'm trying to say, is it seems like the wealthy are doing their best to eliminate guys like me, and with robots they look clever? Not greedy, but clever--

They didn't like unions, so move the whole racket overseas.

They still want to rid humans from the equation; build better robots. Something our Forefathers wouldn't have even hallucinated about when writing that document (The Constitution) that kinda served us well, or some of us?

Now--in order to make things more efficient--let the robots do the job. And get rid of that employee, along with his retirement account, and his pesky health care demands!

The movie Norma Rae, starring Sally Field, couldn't be filmed today. I was watching it the other night, and while I loved it, I just thought about currently empty (I'm assuming) Cotton Factory sitting empty in the Midwest. In the movie, the machines were the robots. The machines weren't the enemy though, it was the greedy owners.

The owners finally found a way to rid themselfs of those pesky unions by moving.

If machines/robots get so good, the greedy owners will be able to eliminate all human help. The world will be there marketplace. Every country will have the 1 percent, and there spawn who will buy, and the few who have very protected jobs, like doctors. (Doctors are a bad example. They are only protected here.)

Guys like me will dead, or like zombies stumbling around the buildings while the robots do their job. (I'm sorry about this essay. I know it's convoluted.)

I watch tv, and see the wealthy yelling things at a machine, and the items showing up on doorstep. Where will people be the money to pay for the connivence?

It's gonna all be rosy for the the wealthy, but guys like me will be delivering the packages, until a robot takes that job.

(Sorry about the discombobulated essay. I'm just seeing happy people, and way, way too many misserable/Homlessness people.)

Let me tell you a story.

I have a friend. He was hired in an industrial complex, doing a lot of hard work, moving stuff, building, most of the time outside, in cold. One day he got fired, not his choice. After some time he found a nice job, this time in an office. He was working 100% from the computer, managing some stuff, and sitting all day. In the first month he was amazed what he missed, the calmness, it was always warm, no physical labour, etc.

I met him after 3 months there. He was the most depressed person I ever met. What happened? Lack of activity.

It's a demo. Crafted to show off the best side they possibly could. Who knows how well it actually works in practice when google isn't cherry picking the best results to show.

That is my impression of current AI research as an almost layman at the field. Using traditional proven methods to get an approximation and then deep learning and/or other machine learning algorithms (and trained data) to refine those approximations.

Seem to be a very "organic" kind of AI, even with the flaws of human minds. Thinking about it can be spooky given how much it evolved in just a few years.

Well, what's disappointing from a vision standpoint is that we are not making much progress understanding vision. Instead we are making progress in solving machine vision.

I think your professor isn't looking for results so much as a good explanation for the vision problem, a "unified theory" of vision that you could, in principle, code up from theory alone.

Preferred Infrastructure. They have this weird naming system which I don’t fully understand there’s Preferred Infrastructure and Preffered Networks. They seem to be essentially the same company, but use two names...

And learn to get rid of these pesky humans that are mostly lazy criminals and a resource drain.

in either case - until cheaper robots elsewhere cause those paychecks to disappear ...

Completely OT but I always find it fascinating how liberal differs so much between languages. In my country liberals are the ones actively working against unions and who embrace capitalism.

Those bugs aren't unique to humanity. You can find those behaviors In many of the more intelligent animal species as well.

Dogs are smart enough to get bored, or jealous.

Parrots seem to be a living nightmare because they are smart enough to develop all sorts of interesting traits. How do you deal with a depressed parrot?

Dolphins kill for sport.

You get smart enough you’re going to realize gluing the ends of a package of fruit by the foot together all day is a totally waste of CPU cycles.

But then what isn’t a waste?

Maybe they’ll get smart enough that they realize doing anything is a waste and then they’ll just shut themselves off.

I wonder if this news means chainer/cupy will gain more weight?

This. R&D is great, and gets us on HN excited, but it takes a Steve Jobs to come along a few years later to produce a product which creates a market which stimulates and funds the next round. Business success is important for technology development. Voice assistants are probably close, but I feel like we’re on the verge of a big category-defining concept/tech/product in the AI field. The basic technology is there, plenty of people can identify needs, but I don’t think we’ve hit the ‘iPhone’ moment yet.

What fields do attract the smartest people in Japan, in your opinion?

The downvotes are probably because it's phrased like a race-essentialist statement, a type of statement that many people are very wary of (rightly, imo!). As you point out, there's a good chance it wasn't intended that way.