ALOHA robot learns from humans to cook, clean, do laundry

Even when we reach a point where the hype is appropriate and the tech is actually ready and I can expect to finally buy a robot that will clean my house and do our dishes I still won't be getting one since you can bet that any robot sold to consumers will be constantly recording audio and video of the inside of our homes to send back to the manufacturer and all of that data will ultimately be used to enrich others at our expense, shared with law enforcement, and most likely end up in the hands of data brokers.

The days where new cool technology that would make our lives better was something to look forward to are over. Now it's "How is this new technology going to be used against me?" and "How soon will this technology be deliberately made worse in order to take more from my family?"

The best we can hope for is that cleaning robots will be something that people can build and program themselves from trusted parts, but considering how that hasn't worked out for most of the recent tech in our lives today I'm not encouraged. No one I know is using a cell phone, a smart TV, or a modern game console that they built themselves. Most people feel that they are incapable of even putting a simple camera on their own front door that doesn't also hand their data over to amazon and to the police.

Until new technology can be truly owned by the people who pay for it, and isn't used against the buyer for someone else's interests I'll be skeptical of every new device and gadget they try to sell us.

The teleoperated thing was flagged by Rodney Brooks years ago as both a scary risk, but also a driver for autonomous robotics. The threat is that this is a mechanism to partition poor people from richer people comprehensively - they will not be permitted to share the same space but instead will operate proxy bodies that can be confiscated at any time. The poor will live 100's of KM from the rich and will be forced to accept harsh social conditions, and the rich will not have to confront the reality of the poor's humanity.

This is a very very bad vision of the future.

> It's real progress, but the hype exceeds the results.

It's to late, my girlfriend already caught me watching it. Telling her the real thing is slower had no effect. I then told her the final product looks like this. https://youtu.be/ACtozUE6Rzw

While i do believe that LLMs are much faster in becoming better due to their nature of just being software, i do think that GPT 3 broke the investment barriere due to people just understanding/getting it.

With Robots, i also think this is just another demonstration which shows more in what direction it is going than we had bevor. Teslas fake Robot demonstration helps here too.

I personally think we are at the start of the robot exponentail curve and i bet i will see a useful working robot in the next 10-20 years.

And the usefulness of a robot can be achieved a lot sooner now tx to the AI progress / investment. alone Wishper pushed boundaries a lot. Never seen something free with such a good audio to text quality.

If a robot is able to understand "bring this blocks to the top of the building" and will be able to act on it, boom.

We are also seeing a lot of progress in similiar fields like game character movement, training physical worlds in virtual simulation (a lot of progress of nvidia and digital twins).

Industrial robots have a training mode where the motors and clutches are disengaged so the operator can position this multi-ton robot through the movements it wants it to make. I thought that was really cool to watch them being programmed through physical input.

Thats why i think that AI/LLMs etc. are a gamechanger: Not because they can generate text (which is impressive by itself) but because they are very very good in translating human wishes into computer interfaces.

Hi robot, here is my kitchen. Here are dishes etc.

It's a strange thing to see ML now making computers work how non-programmers think they've always worked.

> Basically, no real breakthrough has happened in robotics and everyone is hoping to be able to replicate LLMs/vision path for robotics (i.e. data). But no one really knows how to even collect so much high quality data and no one is even remotely close to executing it. The best we seem to have done is: https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/

ALOHA + RT-X is a great combo to collect a lot of somewhat uniform data to enable such a breakthrough.

> Overall, just too much hype.

True. :)

This is why I really hope some highly popular consumer product (smartphone, smart glasses etc.) starts having high quality LiDAR sensors so we have a lot of 3D training data.

I don't believe there's any way to handle the open-ended complexity of the real world other than data. Whether that comes from human demonstrations or self-collected with reinforcement learning, there's just no way around it.

But I disagree there has been no progress. Check out this lecture from Sergey Levine about sample-efficient RL in the real world (no simulator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17NrtKHdPDw

1-human tele-operating 10-robots seems like an obvious solution Is any one working on this?

Certainly for most commercial/industrial/agriculture/hotels/mining settings (in fact, everything except a private apartment butler thingy..?)

Wondering whether some combination of rfid, volume mapping, to map (learn) an apartment/home could help bridge the gap, on home automation. Could the stove, washers, driers, furniture... 'help' ? I guess it's been tried to death but I lack a good view of SOTA on home automation and robotics.

I don't think it's necessary for an open-ended system.

I think the operative word here is delicious.

It depends on how good the robot is at it. Anyone can make a meal taste better fast by just dumping extra butter into everything.

I suspect it'd help people vary up their diets more at least, since they can ask for something new rather than rehashing the same 5-10 meal types over and over again. Would that make for healthier food? Maybe, because at least part of why at least some people eat unhealthily is because it's easy to cook the same few things over and over again.

There are some genuinely delicious foods that are healthier than junk food and most people would agree tastes better, but they don’t want to cook or don’t want to learn. A robot that excels at cooking can serve you a delicious, healthy meal from a different cuisine every day. Theoretically you can go for years without having the same meal twice. The robot can also take your target macros and nutrition into consideration when deciding on what to cook and how much of it.

One problem is that experts can’t even agree on what a “healthy” diet is. See Vegan vs. Low-Carb/Carnivore. For every documentary “proving” that one is better than the other, there is another one “proving” the opposite. There are doctors, professors of nutrition, corruption, paid for research results, and people who have dramatically improved their health on both sides of the battle line. Nutritional science nowadays reminds me more of politics or religion than science. With people screaming at each other from different camps.

Do middle-aged (ie <45 years old) people realize that these robots will be their primary caregivers when they are old? People are having fewer children and populations are shrinking in most places. For increasingly large numbers of people, there really won't be anyone around to take care of you or help you out when you're old (ie, >70). You're either gonna have a humanoid to help you live independently, or you're gonna have a bad time.

I am pretty sure I've seen videos of commercial robots power washing public bathrooms. Probably not a solution for normal bathrooms with wood furniture and fabric items but it is definitely possible today.

Does it need to get all the socks? Even the ones stuck between the frame and the drum?

That might be at least as difficult as folding.

Having a robot to solve that problem seems like overengineering - there are integrated washing-machine/dryer combos in one appliance, bit less efficient then separate devices, but solves the problem of transferring the clothes.

Only via superuser privileges.

The problem wasn’t that it couldn’t make a pizza. It couldn’t make a pizza on a moving vehicle.

A reminder that so called engineers will bleed you dry before anything. As with many robotics projects, the people hired excel in one thing:doing what they already know. That is why you and I never see new robots.

From https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha.aspx it looks like it's derived from "A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation" without the S, B or T.