We’re going to witness an explosion of affordable humanoid robots in every home & business, and as they become increasingly capable the use cases will be nearly limitless. Think deliveries, cleaning, even childcare (Bicentennial Man, anyone?). I think what will be shocking is just how fast this happens, and they’ll likely outnumber humans at some point.
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
There was this video last week of a "westworld" factory in China too: https://newatlas.com/robotics/chinese-humanoid-robots-realis...
It looks like they have a direct-drive motor that can operate joints with no gears.[1] Is that right? If they use all direct drive motors, these robots are mechanically simple. No gears, no strings, no pulleys, maybe no separate bearings.
A production line for a custom motor is expensive to set up, but once production is running, each motor is cheap. An encoder is cheap if designed into the motor. This is the route to volume production.
Machine learning has made the control problem much easier. The classic approach was to work out the dynamics analytically. (I used to struggle with that in the 1990s). That's the old Boston Dynamics approach. Now that's obsolete. BD must be using some machine learning by now. The video of Atlas doing a flip showed the planning process briefly. It was very pre-planned. They must be beyond that by now.
With good temperature monitoring and over-speced MOSFETS, those direct drive motors can probably be way overdriven for a few hundred milliseconds. That's probably the future. You don't need that extra power all that often, but sometimes you do.
Good to know.
For the first year, after that society will collapse as the largely now unemployed low income and middle class arm up and start pillaging for survival.