Elon Musk Has No Idea What He’s Doing with Tesla Bot
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
“It's almost like the dev who worked on the feature left, and nobody has taken over that duty yet.”
That was two years ago.
So Tesla could easily have used similar tech given the cars are always connected.
I don't think this line of argumentation holds up very well: we already have decades of research on humanoid robots too. They're just not good enough to be economically viable but they same could be said of electric cars and reusable rockets.
Why couldn't Tesla just hire enough people to replicate the published research and then improve it? The total amount of money invested in robotics worldwide is probably not even that high. The capital required to duplicate Boston Dynamics doing parkour is probably much less that what Tesla is already investing in custom AI hardware.
The stature isn't the main reason for the versatility of humans. I guess humanoid robots would be useful in situations where familiarity is important, but Tesla probably wants more than just a premium customer greeter with integrated voice assistant.
Even humans can't always reach the highest shelves without a ladder. I'd like to see a humanoid robot successfully climb one up and down while holding an object; that alone would be an insane achievement.
A good humanoid robot costs a ton, to a point where I doubt it'll see much use in normal households. I'd love to be wrong in that aspect, but I haven't yet seen an affordable robot beyond hobby project standards. Imho a humanoid body would be a nice bonus once everything else is working reliably and there's enough demand, not what I'd start out with.
So, a robot in a human environment must be about human height and width, but also its width should be roughly uniform from top to bottom like a human.
I suppose you could build a quadruped of those dimensions, but it's hard to imagine what it'd look like. I am not aware of any creatures like that occurring in nature, likely with good reason.
Somehow that has not turned out to be a major problem with the closest thing we already have in widespread "use": Dogs.
I think we can agree that humans are pretty good at not stepping on a retriever-sized thing by accident. Not to mention that these robots will probably not be very quiet (servos can be pretty noisy). So if that's the biggest problem, we'd be in pretty good shape.
Just ask the Daleks.
For one, humanoid robots are a bit less creepy than the alternatives. Have you seen the BD robots?
That’s not as important for industrial use, though.
Obviously there are complexities to it, which is why don't have any level 4 vehicles is just so much lower.
Humanoid robots are just several magnitudes harder because you first have to master the basic mechanics of human-like movement before you can move onto higher order things like avoiding running into a person. With a bipedal robot, a simple operation like walking up a hill is a major achievement. In the car domain, you essentially get that stuff for free.
The humanoid form factor might be an entirely unnecessary distraction, a robot with more legs or non-human articulations would be just as useful.
Re: successfully demonstrated, again Boston Dynamics might be the best example. Their bipeds are nowhere near the functionality levels Elon is describing - fine motor skills, vision, even walking (it’s my understanding that Boston Dynamics has to individually tune their bipeds for every course) are years and years away from hitting Elon’s goals at current rate of progress.
Furthermore, the BD bipeds have a battery life of about ten minutes. You need a revolution in either energy storage density or kinematic efficiency or more likely both to get a useful assistant bot out of it.
None of these robots can hang our laundry to dry, de-bone a chicken or cook a meal. They cannot perform any of the thousands of tasks we perform every day that require dexterity. They have just about mastered locomotion, and that's it.
These are the same people that were laughing at him when he launched tesla. The same people whole said Apple was doomed, because they only had a smartphone. Etc. etc. etc.
Musk is good in the former and not so good in the latter.
You are making the exact same dismissive mistake Elon is making: Just ignoring the existing work, or assuming it is somehow just shoddy.
I am getting tired of people praising Elon joke projects as world-changing.
Its a voice assistant, we already have them, there is nothong world changing. Also Hyperloop is and Boring company are pretty useless, and are likely to stay that way - passenger capacity of every hyperloop design and of the tonnela are pethetic compared to a normal train
There are going to be lightweight criticisms of this concept (Musk invites those by making someone dress up in a morph suit and dance like a robot). But there are also going to be more realistic criticisms such as the fact that whilst Humanoid robots have remained science fiction, non-humanoid robots have proliferated massively across industries that were previously fully manual. It'd be great if we could build a humanoid robot to replace all those humans trudging around Amazon fulfillment centres- but we don't need to, because those robots have no reason to be humanoid in the first place.
I'm tired of people pretending that just the aspiration to change the world excuses you from real criticism of your ideas. There are plenty of people out there changing the world- some of them mentioned in the article, and those people actually thought out what they were doing before getting a guy in a morph suit to dance in front of the worlds press. Let's not forget, we're still waiting for the autonomous driving promises Musk has failed to deliver on for years now.
A lot of experts in cars and rockets claimed that Tesla and SpaceX are terrible ideas and they were proved wrong many times. Incumbents are too often dismissive of new ideas.
Many of the arguments against the boring company are "social arguments" from people who are ideologically committed to bikes and public transport. They have very little to do with whether it is possible to build cheaper tunnels.
Can we see some references to these experts?
The author uses naivety, but this statement is very questionable to anyone interested in spaceflight. No, "we" didn't have any vertically landing reusable rocket capable of autonomous reentry, except one primitive atmospheric demo vehicle with manual primary controls. Let alone engines such as Raptors in the western world.
Anyhow, the presentation itself didn't seem to take itself very seriously, so I wouldn't think too much about the (very difficult) feasibleness of this, they must be aware. Hell, it may just be an elaborate advertisement for jobs.
But we know with 100% certainty we'll never find out unless we try.
"look I spent $50k on this android - it makes fart noises and tries to jump off the pavement into a bush every few days"
Hyperloop didn't work out and the remaining related projects are looking more and more like scams. In the last few years no noteworthy progress has been made and even the most basic questions haven't ever been answered.
The Boring Company, which ripped off the original The Boring Company, has one finished project which didn't get close to the original vision and cost enough that further projects were put on hold.
Neuralink is cool but Musk made some really wild claims in their name without much to back them up.
SpaceX and Tesla do some amazing stuff and hopefully they keep being successful. But that doesn't say anything about the rest.
For example Hyperloop is just a concept that other people are trying to implement with very limited resources.
No, there are transport and contruction proffeshionals explaining that economics of the Hyperloop cannot work, it requires more effort to build and has 100x less capacity and worse safety than any bullet train.
The Boring Company doesn't even make sence, how are they making tonnels cheaper? Have they achieved anything at all? There is no 'core of innovation' behind it
Virgin Hyperloop raised $160 million from investors and all they can show after 7 years is a successful trip through the massively downscaled 500m test track, at a fraction of the advertised speed.
So far nobody could show that it can compete with standard high-speed trains, how those by far largest vaccum chambers are supposed to be maintained and protected, or how the metal tube's massive temperature-dependent expansions are going to be handled. Those are huge engineering challenges and all they seemed to focus on so far are some public partnerships and interior designs.
Musk was wise to get off that train.
Musk's fans give him too much credit for announcing future work.
Sending astronauts to Mars surface and bringing them home is energetically horrific. It's not so much the getting to Mars orbit bit that's hard work (at least, from Earth orbit), as descending into a gravity well and then getting back out of it again.
But current Mars robots have a huge control lag due to speed of light delays (up to 30 minutes between Earth/Mars, depending on where both planets are). It'd be easier to explore the surface using robots if they were controlled by astronauts in orbit -- say, in a small space station dug into the surface of Phobos or Deimos for radiation shielding.
And the easiest robots for a human to control directly using a conceivable circa-2030s AR rig are either a car-like machine or a human-body-shaped machine.
You could trial such a device on the Moon (as part of the Starship HLS plans NASA is currently backing for the Artemis Program), as an adjunct to actual astronauts on EVA (which is always a risky task). And the software for a human-controlled humanoid robot would be vastly easier to develop than the sort of fully autonomous control system Boston Dynamics is aiming for, hence (I suspect) Musk's over-optimistic projection.
TLDR: I think Musk is trolling Boston Dynamics et al, and his real goal is something a lot more practical. (Either that or he's been hitting the magic mushrooms again.)
All current efforts are rovers with scientific instruments, nobody has yet attempted to build something capable of clearing rocks for a launch pad let alone mounting solar panels.
This needs to move on from research projects into actual series production.
Especially with the 2.6 second lightspeed delay in any remote control inputs.
However, I think digging holes for radiation shielding in a smallish asteroid-like body -- especially if it's a gravel pile similar to 101955 Bennu -- may prove easier than landing, provisioning, and returning human beings from the Martian surface.
(101955 Bennu, target of the OSIRIS-REx probe, turned out to be a rubble pile. It's an order of magnitude smaller than the Martian moons, which are nevertheless also believed to be rubble piles -- they're not large enough to have significant surface gravity, let alone enough to melt/fuse their rocks.)
Asteroid mining is pretty far from that.
Astronauts in Mars orbit need radiation shielding. So: dig their spacecraft/habitat into one of the Moons.
Humanoid robots: put them on Mars, instead of landing astronauts. That way, you don't need to bring them home afterwards. Meanwhile, with a good AR/VR rig, the astronauts (dug into the Phobos base) can control them remotely with no lag.
The operator would be able to toggle between "drive the truck" and "pick up rocks" modes, depending on which shape is appropriate for the task at hand.
yes, so what? We expect that.
Previous comment here touches upon the connection and inevitable gap between the inspirational BS "what was announced" and final outcomes.
It is easier than dancing and genuinely viable as a product, with that viability increasing with the degree of autonomy.
(edit: here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28243811 )
IIRC it went some thing like:
1) Declare a ludicrous "pie in the sky" / "City on Mars" goal.
2) Use that to inspire, hire clever but starry eyed people who will work 7 days a week in service of that.
3) Iterate rapidly on do-able things in the general direction of the goal.
4) Reach some some point that's far from the original goal, but is still a huge achievement (e.g. re-usable rockets to LEO).
5) Profit!
6) Use the profits to start again, with another field that has synergy to the last (e.g. if you have electric cars, then add solar panels and battery packs)
In terms of humanoid robots this makes sense, the "10% to the goal" point is useful, and ties into the space plan. Robotics and space have synergies.
Note: original post calls the big goal "relatable, unoriginal" - this is a feature not a bug: to inspire, pick something that people already understand. Something that you don't have to explain.
I think he uses his media power for a good purpose even if he himself or his company cannot reach such goals, he creates the stepping stones in a future that I really like to see happen.
Mostly it’s pretty obvious. Tunnel boring machines to dig hyperloop tunnels to take passengers from the starship spaceport to the nearest city on Mars? Check. (Why isn’t he building hyperloops himself? No need to create a vacuum on Mars… but the vehicle research will be interesting)
Remember there is no atmosphere nor magnetic fields on other planets to protect you from cosmic rays, so a good solution is make people live underground.
Some time ago a teacher offered me to make my Master thesis on that(I did not take it) because there were people already working on this problem.
BTW, places like the moon are very interesting. Because there is no fluid erosion every single grain of sand is extremely abrasive.
Indeed, robots already can hammer nails into walls. Or dig holes. But we still pay construction workers to do these things (well, usually operating tools/machines - but we decidedly don't let those devices operate themselves). And it turns out that the results of them following orders too literally (like a robot would) tends to lead to funny (or tragic) videos clips.
See also this recent HN article, which discusses (the failures of) automating a much more restricted task in a seemingly straightforward domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28054606
https://japantoday.com/category/tech/japanese-convenience-st...
Even if the robot will never be real, he can keep these people excited and maybe gather new talent
That is, if it shares the AI stack with Tesla AP.
Maybe if they could get it to a reasonable price point and get it to follow someone they could sell some of these as novelty type thing.