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Comment by bwhiting2356 | Hacker News Reader

I want AI to help me in the physical world: folding my laundry, cooking and farming healthy food, cleaning toilets. Training data is not lying around on the internet for free, but it's also not impossible. How much data do you need? A dozen warehouses full of robots folding and unfolding laundry 24/7 for a few months?

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We are close. Language models and large vision models have transformed robotics. It just takes some time to get hardware up and running.

I think it would be many decades before I'd trust a robot like that around small children or pets. Robots with that kind of movement capability, as well as the ability it pick up and move things around, will be heavy enough that a small mistake could easily kill a small child or pet.

That's a solved problem for small devices. And we effectively have "robots" like that all over the place. Sliding doors in shops/trains/elevators have been around for ages and they include sensors for resistance. Unless there's 1. extreme cost cutting, or 2. bug in the hardware, devices like that wouldn't kill children these days.

> Sliding doors in shops/trains/elevators have been around for ages and they include sensors for resistance

Some of these are pretty crazy too.

Here's a video from 14 years ago where a table saw stops fast enough that it didn't scratch a hotdog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq3o0VGUh50

So even if this hypothetical robot had saws for hands it could be mostly safe (in theory).

Even for adults, a robot that would likely have to be close to as massive as a human being, in order to do laundry and the like, would spook me out, moving freely through my place.

You'd learn to trust it. People have pet dogs that could kill them if they wanted. As can other humans walking around your house.

People also have essentially wild beasts in their home: cats. If cats were the size of small dogs they would kill people all the time, but we love them when they are small enough so they just claw you bloody.

Since we can live with that we can live with anything that doesn't outright murder us.

> have transformed robotics

Did they? Where? Seriously, I genuinely want to know who is employing these techniques.

All frontier labs are now employing LVMs or LLMs. But that's my point is you won't see the fruits of it this early.

That's the point being made. It's transformed robotics research, yes, but it both remains to see whether it will have a truly transformative effect on the field as experienced by people outside academia (I think this is quite probable) and more pointedly when.

I think this is an opinion borne out of weariness with constant promises that amazing robots are right around the corner (as they have been for 20 odd years now). For anyone who is close to the front line, I think the resounding consensus is clear - this time is different, unbelievably different, and capability development is going to accelerate dramatically.

I think it's impossible to spend a lot of time with these models without believing robotics is fundamentally about to transform. Even the most sophisticated versions of robotic logic pre-LLM/VLM feel utterly trivial compared to what even rudimentary applications of these large models can accomplish.

> have transformed robotics

When questioned:

> believing robotics is fundamentally about to transform

These are not even remotely the same thing. Something that has happened already and is verifiable fact is not the same thing as your opinion, even if your opinion is based on a lot of sound arguments and reasoning.

Very tiresome to read so many claims of fact based on opinion of what will happen in the future.

The discussion was about whether robotics was about to transform or not. And obviously it is because of how much basic robotics workloads improve with these models.

Really not that hard.

> have transformed robotics

> about to transform

Apparently even english tenses are too hard, let alone anything else. Bald faced lie, to claim what you think might happen in the future has already happened in the past. No matter "what the discussion was about", or what arguments you bring to support your estimation of the future.

https://www.figure.ai/

specifically their speech demo video (which is, of course, a demo video)

https://youtu.be/Sq1QZB5baNw

https://www.1x.tech/neo and

https://www.unitree.com/h1/

are undoubtedly using such models.

It's an area of active research, eg

https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0

https://wholebody-b1.github.io/

https://ok-robot.github.io/

https://mobile-aloha.github.io/

Laundry folding is an instructive example. Machines have been capable of home-scale laundry folding for over a decade, with two companies Foldimate and Laundroid building functional prototypes. The challenge is making it cost-competitive in a world where most people don't even purchase a $10 folding board.

I would guess that most cooking and cleaning tasks are in basically the same space. You don't need fine motor control to clean a toilet bowl, but you've gotta figure out how to get people to buy the well-proven premisting technology before you'll be able to sell them a toilet-cleaning robot.

Counterexample: Everyone uses dishwashers. Yet I don’t think we’ll have a robot doing the dishes human-style, or even just filling up and clearing out a dishwasher, within the next decade or two, regardless of price.

Part of the tradeoff there is efficiency. I like my dishwasher because it's as good at getting things clean as I am but it does it using less water and less soap, and at scale, it takes less time too. It's just a great use case for machine automation because you can do clever stuff w/a dishwasher that's hard to replicate outside of that closed environment.

I struggle to imagine a scenario where a 1-2 person household would get the same benefits from something like a laundry-folding robot. I hate folding my laundry and I still can't imagine buying one since I simply don't do laundry that often. If I really wanted to spend less time doing laundry, I could spend the cost of that laundrybot on a larger collection of clothing to wear, for that matter.

Robot vacuums are a good comparison point since vacuuming is something you (ideally) do frequently that is time and labor intensive. I do own one of those, and if it got better at dealing with obstacles thanks to "AI" I would definitely like that.

I think it would have to be a general-purpose robot, and doing the laundry would just be one of many things it can do, similar to how running a particular program is only one of many things a computer can do. More than that, I believe it would actually require a general-purpose robot to handle all contingencies that can arise in doing laundry.

As someone who does laundry about twice a week, it would certainly be nice. But it’s a pie in the sky at this time even just on the technological side.

I think the problem of those is that they are special purpose, and probably too expensive and bulky for that single purpose.

A single general-purpose robot that can do everything would be much easier to sell.

There's plenty of machines which are expensive, bulky, single purpose and yet commercially successful. The average American household has a kitchen range, refrigerator, dishwasher, laundry machine, dryer, television, furnace, and air conditioner. Automatic coffee machines and automatic vacuums are less universal but still have household penetration in the millions. I really think the household tasks with no widely available automation are simply the ones that nobody cares enough about doing to pay for automation.

A robot servant that does literally 100% of chores would be a game changer, and I expect we'll get there at some point, but it will probably have to be a one-shot from a consumer perspective. A clever research idea to reach 25% or 50% coverage still isn't going to lead to a commercially viable product.

Interesting - I would think the neighborhood laundromat offering wash/fold service could invest in a laundry folding robot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem?

Many non-AI products already reduce chore time:

* Washer-Dryer Combos

* Soylent/Huel bars

* Self-cleaning toilets / automatic toilet bowl cleaners

* Robotic vacuums / mowers / pool/litter cleaners

* Pet/plant feeders

> robotic litter boxes

Has successfully guilotined several cats.

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