VR robots are building railways in Japan | Hacker News Reader

VR robots are building railways in Japan

virtualuncle.com

148 pointsdanboarder38 comments

Teleoperation in VR makes a lot of sense for some applications. E.g. when you want stereo vision for relative positioning. Here’s the same thing but for timber loading:

https://www.hiab.com/en/digital-solutions/hivision/hivision-...

This may be an ingenious way to solve labor availability problems in America by boosting productivity and changing the nature of construction jobs to attract more people.

P.S: That end-effector design could be more..versatile. But still for a first hyper-specific job design. Very nice.

It's ingenious, highly effective, and exactly what we should do.

Ex-McKinsey executives will kybosh it and hire minimum wage workers to avoid shelling out for the CapEx.

It's the American way.

A few years ago that would be true. These days, minimum wage workers are getting harder to find.

But that's only if the search is constrained to immediate locality. The "great" thing about this concept is that we can hire minimum wage workers overseas to control robots in America (latency be damned).

Once does not simply damn latency. Latency damns you.

If you read the national political news.

Hundreds of politicians and government officials are working feverishly to "fix" this.

For them, technological progress is the enemy because it disrupts the social hierarchy.

We must have minimum wage workers, to maintain the social hierarchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer

If the people steering the robots are located in a different country than the work side, would they need a work visa?

That's a good question. It's already not that uncommon to do surgeries remotely using surgical robots, operated by a surgeon on another continent. I wonder if the labor laws have caught up to this yet.

Uh, it's been done a few times as a neat tech demo, but the reality of surgery is that you really need a surgeon there, in the room, who is capable of doing the surgery as an open procedure if the robotic attempt fails, or if they hit a bleeding source.

And you need someone who's qualified to place the ports in the body in the first place.

In practically all cases, if someone needs a highly specialized surgeon, it's logistically much simpler to take the patient to them.

Video of the robot in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzHsPgnQ26Y

"It can lift objects of up to 88 lbs in weight"

That's surprisingly not a lot for something that size.

The arms have a large extension and seem relatively delicate.

So it'd basically just a versatile but limited crane with a novel UI

That depends on its dexterity. Can a crane use tools, weld, rivet and so on? Certain not. But this machine m, once refined could plausibly do all of those things and is seen using some kind of grasper tool.

Yes and no. It really depends on how fast and accurately you want to move that much mass. I worked on a mobile robot years ago that weighted ~5000lbs. It was only putting 2mL of fluid into a tile on the space shuttle at a time. It needed to be that heavy because it had to be very careful not to damage the tiles (or the shuttle) and it needed to move in and out of the same standard height doors at the orbiter processing facilities that people walked through, but then needed to operate at up to 13' in height.

Humm... that U-shaped piece it's lifting looks like it was custom made for this robot, but doesn't appear to fit anywhere.

But then, what matters here is how much fun they had designing the robot!

You can literally see the same u-shaped thing on the next portal, it's used to keep the power feeding wire up.

But I guess, what matters here is how much fun you had on writing your snarky comment ;)

Wow you guys would be great friends! That's what really mattered ... not the snarky comments, but the friends we made along the way :)

That robot had a pretty extensive supporting human team. As technology improves, I hope it could be more self-sufficient, but that video did not demonstrate a clear savings vs meatbags.

Seems like the "savings" come from keeping people in a safer, predictable ground location.

1. Not "VR", just remote sensing of actual-reality and transmission to immersive controls.

2. It's not robots per se, it's remote-controlled arms. i.e. the machine does not operate on its own. A bit like a remote-controlled exosuit/power-armor.

3. Not "are building" but "may build".

Other than that - great. Grr.

Title is misleading: it implies that this is already happening, when the article actually says that there are plans to do this in the future.

I wonder how they implemented the force feedback for the weight perception. In this case it‘s not that difficult because they can use passive haptics/ a grounded haptic display. Nonetheless I‘d like to know how precisely the operator can feel weight.

Here is a video showing the UX of a similar VR robot control system from the recent XPRIZE competition. It's using much more than just VR to control and get feedback from the system.

ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals - Winning team NimbRo Day 2 Test Run https://youtu.be/8AwgGSpcAe8

That makes a lot of sense. That's a horrible working environment, with high voltage, working in the air, and trains on adjacent tracks.

It looks like a prototype, though, with exposed belts and pulleys.

Seems like a good idea on how to do gradual automation.

First build a robot that can be controlled in VR and start selling it to get some income. Then you have the time to work on software to make it self-operational.

Is Tesla Bot going to be remotely-controllable before the "FSD" is ready? (Provided that it ever ships.)

The idea of using VR technology to remotely control heavy machinery and improve workplace safety is a promising one, and I can see how it could be applied in other industries as well. It will be interesting to see how it performs in testing and if it ultimately leads to increased productivity and safety.

… why have the operator sit in the cab? If truly teleoperated, then wouldn’t it be safer for the operator to be in a room far enough from the robot so that if there is some accident that crushes the cab or sends electricity through it, there is no damage to the operator?

Because then you have to transport an additional cab / office with climate control and crush protection to site too.

And provide guaranteed comms between the two.

Telepresence and teleoperation is a natural extension of VR.

It’s v likely that by 2030 having robots in work/home controlled by someone in another country would be seen as the norm.

Seriously considering doing a startup on ^

This is what happens when a generation raised on mecha anime grows up.

Science fiction is influenced by science fact.

BUT

Popular science fiction also influences future science fact by "seeding" cool ideas to use science for.

This is why all the "dystopian future" stories are concerning. We need solarpunk. But solarpunk needs to be interesting in more than a utopian sense before it will spread amongst the mainstream. I love the idea of solarpunk but I find it boring.

That’sa genius idea for line work. It reduces the number of crew needed and drastically improves safety since falls are pretty much the biggest hazard.

I wonder how long until someone puts guns on its arms.

f** he's got a GUN! DAM!

Clearly we will need Patlabors.

I'm sure its a niche opportunity due to the high voltage lines that run along the railway, unlimited electric power source its the only thing we need to start developing ironman-like suits.

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