Figure 01 has learned to make coffee
twitter.com
twitter.com
The robot is not "making coffee".
It is placed in front of a Keurig, coffee cup already in place, water already filled, powered on.. with a pod in front.
It is doing essentially 3 things - pick&place pod, secure latch, press go.
Which… now that I think about it… is probably drawing a skeleton over top of the video Kinect-style, and… drawing a tool path…
But at least it seems to understand when it’s made a mistake, which is interesting.
I just find it annoying how many of these AI companies are pumping goofy B2C applications.
Like they make it look as though they are building a breakthrough humanoid robotic assistant or something, but really that is still very very far away and not at all related to the "video trained robotic arm" breakthrough they are trying to communicate.
Now expand the Keurig use case to the real world.
Present it with a machine: * filled / not filled with water * used pod bin empty / used pod bin filled * pods available / pods in a box on counter / pods in a box in the cabinet * cup on counter / cup in cabinet / cup in dishwasher / cup in sink
We now have ~50 permutations of even the simple Keurig use case and let me know how many years of training to accomplish even this. All of this to make fairly bad coffee.
We haven't even gotten into your example of actually making real coffee.
A general purpose robot can learn new tasks in a modest amount of time.
As you argue, fluidly chaining sequences of learned tasks together is tricky, but current AI technology is capable of solving nearly all those problems within a handful of years.
With centralized learning labs, over-the-air updates, and a 2x or 3x improvement in execution speed of precision tasks, I think this type of solution is going to be ubiquitous within the decade.
From the hype, I was expecting it to pass the full Woz test:
1. Walk into a strange house and find the kitchen.
2. Find whatever coffee is available, including knowing likely places to look. Choose the best among multiple options based on the best available information about the drinker's likely preferences.
3. Find whatever coffee maker is available, get it out without screwing anything else up, assess its condition, clean it if-and-only-if necessary, plug it in, figure out its controls.
4. Similarly find filters or other supplies if necessary.
5. Grind the coffee if necessary to match the coffee maker and the desired results.
6. "Make the coffee" in the sense these guys are trying to claim is a breakthrough.
7. Serve it, or at least put it it in a cup and tell the user.
8. Put everything away and clean up
9. Take any available feedback on making it better next time.
You could queue up a dozen of kitchen use cases that individually look impressive if you don't think at all.
But they are just rhyming variations of "pick&place, then hit the button".
Can it truly learn via video visualization of humans performing an action and replicate?
During “training”, what feedback does it use, and what is the goal function to signify success?
A $30K robot with 10 years useful lifetime, and a 10 year 5% mortgage is $10.40 per day. Minimum wages range from $7 to $15, so the US national average would be around that. If your robot can do 1 hour of minimum wage labour per day, people will buy it.
This is a pretty low bar. Light cleaning (dusting, wiping down surfaces, vacuum), loading the dishwasher, doing laundry, tidying up after kids, etc. These tasks don't demand AGI, agility, adeptness, speed, accuracy, etc.
I do agree these tasks don’t demand AGI. I don’t really want my “robot that walks around and does 11$ worth of tasks I don’t want to deal with” to feel emotions.
I expected the robot would be grinding beans, filling the coffee holder, tamping, fitting the holder to a steam machine and pulling an espresso for a certain time.
I could even understand fitting a coffee filter to a holder, dropping ground coffee and dripping hot water until a certain level is reached.
Those things require a lot more decisions than "open machine, drop capsule, close machine, press button".
But it feels like theatrics. Boston dynamics makes utilitarian robots, that all have a seemingly purpose built design to them. Even the bipedal + 2 arms + a head robot Atlas, isn’t forced to constrain itself to human proportions. By comparison this robot seems pretty unstable. I wonder if that has to do with humans and robots being fundamentally made of different materials with very different properties.
I probably answered my own question by calling it “hype-funded”.
But the obvious target market for humanoid robots is retail and hospitality, where there's a high degree of human interaction. In that case, a lot of 'humanness' is needed to suggest to customers that 'yes, you can talk to the robot, and it will do things'. The design of this robot[0], on the other hand, is very un-human (poorly-drawn face aside), telling customers that it has a specific job that doesn't involve them.
[0] https://eftm.com/2020/09/woolworths-robot-for-checking-the-s...
Is the retail space going to get similar value from the robot once the initial “oh wow robot cool” factor wears off?
I don't know that replacing $15/hr at-will labor with a $50k machine that can be vandalized/stolen/etc is going to have a great cost-benefit for most US retailers...
So to me, robots make more sense in purpose driven forms than in some humanoid replica attempt. The humanoid walking form factor is far harder to accomplish, and in many senses possibly less useful.
I could have multiple robots, one for vacuuming, one for doing the dishes, one for gardening, cleaning, renovating, etc. But, if I had one to do all of it any of the purpose-driven forms is likely to fail while the humanoid one _could_ succeed.
For example robotic vacuums and lawn mowers have been around, pretty cheap, and pretty good for some time.
There's lots of home chores that a wheeled robovac with telescoping arms & really good vision could accomplish very well (empty/load dishwasher to/from sink/cabinets, light kitchen work, dusting, sweeping, etc). To deliver this in humanoid form you need to solve all the same vision/arm articulation problems, PLUS all the self balancing/walking/look&feel stuff of a humanoid.
There's actually stuff a robot could do better than me if it had a telescoping arm instead of being humanoid look&feel focussed (dusting / reaching high places etc).
To me it conflates 2 problems and overcomplicates to focus on the humanoid form factor at this stage.
And look at the evolution of some tools - cars do not really look like horse drawn carriages for example. Helicopters don't look like flying cars.
So a good generic bot needn’t be an android, but in that ballpark.
No, I think you answered your question here:
> I get that our built environment is designed for humans
I don't want a purpose built robot that does one task extremely well, I want a general purpose robot that does a huge variety of tasks well-enough. Make me a coffee, then do laundry, then rake some leaves. Coffee served in the wrong mug? Clothes laid flat and not folded because it can't actually fold? Random leaves still on the ground? It's fine, it's good enough! It still saved me a bunch of time.
Remember, these are aimed at car-level prices. $30k for a machine that lasts 10 years means you're paying $10/day, you do not have to be very good to earn your keep at that price.
I'm also less convinced about having all my chores done half-a**sed for $30k up front cost. A $30k investment every 10 years is either going to cost the buyer interest when they finance the purchase, or foregone returns/interest if they keep the lump sum invested. So the true cost is more like $45k. Further, it's now a device you own and are responsible for maintenance/charging/etc I am sure. So now we are talking I dunno, maybe $50k.
And at that price .. $30-50k per decade, you could outsource a subset of your chores to specialists to do 100% of the job, and leave yourself with the subset you don't mind.
$3k is in the ballpark for an annual yard work budget even in HCOL areas. For $5k annually you could probably outsource your laundry entirely with some light housecleaning.
Or you know, find the neighborhood teen (or your own) and see how many $20s it takes to get them to clear your driveway / do your yardwork.
Factories have been designed since the days of Henry Ford's assembly line to treat humans like robots. We have increasingly automated/mechanized the assembly line, introducing robotics of various sorts. So sure, a limited-functionality bipedal robot that costs less than high cost union labor, doesn't go on strike, doesn't take smoke breaks, and doesn't need to eat/rest/sleep is attractive.
But as a general purpose home assistant / personal housekeeper we are far far away, and especially for anything remotely affordable even for FAANG types.
I hired landscapers one year for over $3K, they did well but they came once a month. It was way too expensive for what they did. I tried hiring a guy on an ad-hoc basis, he did a bunch of half-assed work for $30/hr, then disappeared leaving a bunch of garbage in my yard. Cleaners are available for an $25+/hr on freelance sites. I have someone coming in right now for $30/hr, and they're ok, but they only do 4-5hr chunks and so the house has to get noticeably dirty for them to be worth it. No one will come for 1hr/day and do laundry, they have transit overheard, scheduling, etc. Snow clearing is $300+ per season, but they don't show up for anything less than 3", which happens only ~5 times per season, and they'll only do it within 24hrs (ie, you're not going to get your snow cleared when you need it, because everyone needs their snow cleared after a huge snowfall, you might actually be stuck in your house). I spent a bunch of time finding a student do clear snow and he came once and then ghosted me.
I could keep ranting, but the point is simple: the reality is people are hard to find, more expensive and less reliable than your post implies. There is a lot of overhead and the end result is that a bunch of work that should get done, simply does not get done.
A $30,000 10 year mortgage at 6% is $11/day, $4000/year. Charging costs are negligible, like a couple of cents per day. My EV moves 2000kg 100km for $1.50, moving clothes and brushes around the house is nowhere near that. Any competitive company will also provide regular OTA updates that makes your robot more capable over time.
The bar for these humanoids to succeed is very low.
A humanoid robot needs to essentially deliver the navigation ability that FSD has failed to do, as well as a new robotic humanoid frame. The frame hardware & nav software needs to navigate tighter spaces, with tighter precision (fractions of inches rather than feet) in closer contact with flesh&bloods easily damaged humans (within inches of us rather than multiple feet away on a sidewalk).
Think about yard work. Even a half decent yard service has a half dozen bladed tools they wield around your yard. What is your risk appetite for a robot to wield those autonomously around children/pets/neighbors/wildlife/you.
Most industrial robots disable themselves if humans are anywhere nearby and a lot of accidents happen when that system fails. It is going to take a lot of confidence to put robots into homes.
There are not many tasks that require a neck for example. Or a whole head really. This robot feels like it’s designed with a shape in mind first.
The dexterity and wobblyness is actually pretty unimpressive in this example, compared to Atlas, which absolutely feels closer to the full range of human dexterity and physical ability.
Atlas is still general purpose. It’s just built with human tasks in mind first, rather than a human shape.
Am I understanding you correctly that you would want something that still had cameras at head height, but simply didn't have the head form factor? And perhaps had 4 arms for some tasks that it would benefit from instead of being limited to two arms?
If so, how many environments are you going to build robots for? And how does your total overall build cost increase with each different model you build?
Doesn't matter if it's simper in the end-design if getting there ends up costing you as much as it would to build a general purpose design in the first place.
Atlas is a wildly overbuilt thing that's simply not relevant to majority of human tasks. Doing parkour is very impressive, but nobody needs to do backflips to clean the kitchen. The average human has far far fewer capabilities than an idealized 99.99th percentile human. The real world is accommodating of people with various disabilities and limitations, you do not need to be an olympic athlete to live a productive life.
This is exactly why so many people expect ChatGPT to turn into The Terminator.
We’ve been making bipedal, two armed, dexterous robots for a while now, to varying levels of success. They don’t tend to obsess over the slick human look though, since it makes wobbly unbalanced machines, like the one in this video.
Compare to Boston dynamics atlas [0], whose balance and dexterity is almost a bit scary. Is that run a result after many failed runs, yes. Is this video from Figure the result after many failed runs, I would also assume yes. I am much more impressed by what Atlas does though.
Humans are pretty bad design, you could make something simpler and more efficient. And probably not trade too much surface area.
Definitely not the most profitable venture for a robotics company though, unless they’re in the robot porn industry.
Seems like that even for breeding we could do lot better...
If you have a non-humanoid robot, like a Kuka arm, it's a "sharp tool" which is overfit to one specific range of tasks. It's never going to be able to do anything else, and if you wanted to add other tasks, you'd have to overhaul it or create some adapter.
A humanoid robot basically needs no adapter for any common task, in that every common task is already performed by humans, who all have the same components. The benefit is that the range of tasks available to the form factor is massive, versus a Boston Dynamics robot that just picks up and moves packages and can only do that. If the humanoid robot is not only far cheaper, but it can do that tasks, and thousands of others, then that's the better form factor..