While humanoid robots are neat, if not uncanny, I would love to see robots with forms optimized for their work. A large octopus with legs would be ideal for this sort of parts handling job.
This is huge for the industry. Smarter Every Day visited a frisbee factory and they had automated a bunch of things. However, every automation point was extremely protected (fenced off) so that a bumbling human couldn’t walk somewhere and get a limb ripped off. If I remember correctly they joked that it was OSHA or something, which it turned out to be.
The effort required to change a process shouldn't be underestimated.
Especially considered that industrial environments are already (a) automated for lowest-hanging fruit things (e.g. moving stuff around at human height) & (b) optimized around human capabilities for the remaining things. Substituting a not-humanlike robot would require reconfiguring a lot of existing automation around it.
If you have "like a human, but costs less" that can be plugged into any existing still-human process? You can literally swap them in.
Eventually we'll get to hyperoptimized machines, but an easier sales story to say "We automate your existing human processes."
Yes there will be use cases but it just seems like a problem looking for a solution most of the time.
Not saying the bot isn’t useful, just that it seems more of a gimmick than a real need in any serious factory / plant.
Cranes, carts, lorries, conveyor belts (with vision), my robot vacuum cleaner, my bread baking machine, a car wash, a dishwasher, the ticket gates at the underground, the coffee machine at our office and so on.
There is value to the human form, our versatility and adaptability.
A machine that replicated a human would have incredible economic value (though not for the people whose jobs it replaced). A machine that exceeded a human in versatility, e.g. by having more arms, even more so.
Yes, there are. But that's not caused by lack of humanoid robots, but because these humans are rediculously cheap.
There's absolutely no way that automation and tech can undercut (effective) slave labor.Though already this is happening: your tshirts and socks are probably not hand-knitted by "Bangladeshi children" or Chinese "prisoners", but by machines tailor-made (pun intended) for t-shirt and sock-knitting. This is happening slowly, and in the supply chain there's still loads of manual labor - cotton picked and processed for these socks is more and more automated, but still requires armies of cheap farm-hands.
And then it's really hard to undercut the price of cheap "western" labor with full automation in many sectors. Part of that is due to some form of 90/10 rule: the last 10% of automation is magnitudes more expensive. And many automation leads to a higher TCO, as the people programming, maintaining and optimizing the robots are far more expensive than an "army" of low-wage workers.
Humanoid robots may be an answer in some future, but currently and in near future will certainly not solve these economics. If ever.
You actually end up running a warehouse with less robots because they can easily be repurposed for other duties.
An assembly line with robotic arms has been standard for a long time now. And having many such arms working at the same time is normal. And each robotic arm will be doing one extremely narrowly defined task.
Anything involving autonomous judgment and mobility introduces uncertainty.
Seems at the very least it could have little quad wheel things so it doesn't have to worry about balance as much.
It looks complicated but is a rather simple mechanical design. There are several motors in the base pulling on cables. The arm itself is just segments, disks, and cables. So all the complexity is in the base, and you can surround that with a metal or concrete box to prevent damage. Arm replacement wouldn't be too expensive.
Tesla is now touting wireless car charging, but that's a lot of power to transmit through air.
Though the demo is awesome, the use case is bad. This "problem" of sorting and moving parts around, has long been "solved". It can be forever optimized, sure. But humanoid robots are definitely not that optimization.