Boston Dynamics shows off another major leap in humanoid mobility
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
Back then, you also thought practical robotics would be almost there.
Really makes you think about today's videos, and whether it's just hype all over again.
If you have the data/background, feel free to expand how these demos are different from back then in relation to robotics becoming actually deployable in real arbitrary environments.
That's my gut reaction when I see these announcements. That, and that I don't want a robot that can do cartwheels, because cartwheels don't wash dishes or mow the lawn. I don't see why they aren't focusing on demonstrating practical tasks.
Your comment is kind of funny in a way — like telling someone in the demo-scene to just write a spreadsheet already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IPm7f1vI
A mentor of mine in robotics talks about how the people at his research group would watch a video from an old Julia Childs TV show of her chopping vegetables and doing other cooking tasks and they would try to figure out how long until a robot could do those things.
Regardless, I'm impressed with the human-like agility their robots are showing.
The only real metric and practical value is if they can perform tasks in the real, messy world efficient and safely.
All else is PR.
Here's just one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwE-LPS01lk
20 seconds of effort will find you 100 more.
I was at a friend's house (I don't have a lawn) a couple of weekends back and the plates and cutlery and so on we used is just "magically" clean in the morning so long as we remember to put them in the right place, you hear cutting, and outside there's a machine wandering about cutting the lawn periodically.
We don't need a humanoid robot to wash dishes, that's a waste of resources, like when people thought we should have crews of people typing documents rather than just... not.
But they might to replace a commercial manual dish washing position.
Which begs the question - why don't restaurants use actual dish washers? They have a "Commercial dish washer machine", but that's actually just a final sterilizing step, and restaurant dishes are instead washed by hand.
Not the ones I've seen, dishwashers are pretty common. Are you seriously saying that the dishes are handwashed in the Restaurants you know?
From dog to human. And, as I understand it, from hydraulic to electric. Looking in particular at video #3, I get a sense that there has had to be a lot of very expensive iteration to get to something that has nearly exactly the degree of motion of a human.
Maybe the problem with the videos is that we have come to expect this as "normal" and no longer viral. Now, that's kind of a wild thought.
But to your question about when they will be deployable — I would hazard to guess that cost is the issue. If these came down a few orders of magnitude in cost I suspect we will start seeing them deployed.
Just starting 15, 10 or even 5 years ago neural networks have been acing these kinds of "balancing" problems in other areas but with an entirely different architecture.
In 2025 with the rapid expansion of other "AI" fields, I would expect a robot to weld a scaffold from loose parts and THEN cartwheel off it, go to a human handler and pick up an rifle and then hit a target 100 meters away (or similarly "different" task from the welding to show versatility).
There was talk about them being employed even further forward a few times, but I think aerial drones are a lot less complicated & expensive to build, harder to shoot, and most importantly easier to maintain a long-distance wireless connection to.
Dogs, humanoids can better interact with the environment but even back in the day the Boston Dynamics dog marketing was to a large extent automated infrastructure monitoring with things like thermal cams and less so the actual intervention which means you can just get drones with thermal cameras and skip the whole walking issue/cost.
On the other side if you need interaction you can just get an arm. My current employer is looking at the humanoid robots more so for the marketing that they can do things "magically"/without careful preprogramming and adapting to conditions but if you can do that with a humanoid, you can do it with an arm for cheaper still.
The space where you need monitoring, interaction and movement to me seems very limited and even undesired. There's a reason we avoid having people do the entire process from start to finish and like putting them in as short as possible loops..
It took decades for computers, after they appeared in government projects, to become ubiquitous. There were many problems to solve.
In our era, we're just used to average companies hyping up piddling, niche products by calling them new technologies. Sure, if the 'technology' is an electric juicebag squeezer or something, someone can get it from research to market within a year.
All that is aside from whether it's a good idea to thrust robots into the world as quickly as possible. Between robots and AI, we could lose a billion jobs in a short time period.
So when you see the full history, you realize the progress has been fucking amazing.
My feeling at this point is that the best humanoid robots have, from a hardware perspective, surpassed the "minimally viable product" threshold. By this I mean that they are physically capable of completing enough tasks that would make them worthwhile a worthwhile product. They are physically capable of walking the dog, folding the laundry, picking up the living room, bringing in the groceries, etc. It's possible that there are reliability issues to address, but given that the newest generation of bots are fully electric, it's hard to imagine that this is a more difficult problem than those they've already solved.
At this point, we're just waiting on the software to catch up. And surely this problem seems far more doable today than it did 20 years ago, given all the progress we've made in machine vision and machine learning!
We'll know that the robotics revolution is truly imminent when the big players start pouring capital into development. Tesla has already joined the fray. I expect more will follow in the next few years.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0xLVCb-OA [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
Aside from looking a bit sluggish when accelerating, and having too large oscillations in the leg control loop, it looks like motion capture. Very impressive.
1. Intent and Planning -> What am I doing, What will happen when I do it
2. Macro Implementation -> What are instructions down to all my parts
3. Local Implementation -> Given Instructions, let’s move my leg
4. realtime / reactivity -> OK, I’m 3 degrees off expected on this foot, need to rebalance everything.
Figure et al are demoing 1-4, but slow and without motion - just heads and hands.
Tesla’s robot day was demoing 4 only, as far as I can tell — engineers with controllers did all the macro planning and movement requesting - but there’s no way you can rebalance a robot live with a handheld controller - that seems certain to have been live from code.
BD has always existed in this kind of liminal space to me, where it’s not clear that they’re doing anything more than 4 with their demos. Extremely impressive mobility demos, to be clear. But, I’ve never seen a humanoid demo from BD that’s not in what looks a pre-scanned and planned room.
And we never hear claims about 1, 2 or 3 for humanoid robots from BD as far as I’m aware.
I think for years the low level mobility part has been so hard, BD has felt way ahead, the planning and environment responsiveness was just science fiction. Today we see that the top part of that layer can be gotten with vision models, and we’re seeing dual architectures where those vision models instruct small fast models for layers below. My guess is that this architecture is going to be relatively resilient, changing the cost structure and opportunities for robot companies.
So, I guess if I add all this up, we have a race between mobility experts and agile ML teams with robotic experience. And that adds up to some early launch products; I’d imagine they will be clumsy, and that BD will be a late launcher if it ever goes after consumer at all; it may just decide to license. Anyway I’d like to buy one, so the next few years should be interesting.
That's maybe 7 minutes on average combined. It takes probably longer to write some meaningful post here (with some corrections), but we are spoiled these days, pretty irrational, and consider our free time our most important aspect. Some people would prefer eating broccoli or spinach paste to managing dishwasher.
Also, if somebody expects me to fork out 20k for some assistant, there are no limits what I can and should expect out of it. Heck, you can have modern-day slaves for less in most modern societies, not even going into less developed ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8UaiRgqvlc
Its not particularly fun watch though, so there youtube revenue takes a hit.
> Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner.
I guess they also have a sense of humor.
Are they just running on Lithium Ion batteries? And the new electric joint motors are more efficient than powering hydraulics?
These seem very curated, on perfectly flat, grippy surfaces.
Perhaps it just shows how truly difficult the human method of bipedal locomotion really is that this doesn't seem to have been achieved yet.
I look at it as art meets tech. I'm pretty sure Da Vinci would have loved this.
People would surely appreciate automation that helps with household tasks like cleaning, chopping vegetables, and ironing clothes. But such delicate activities don’t seem to be part of BD’s vision....not even on the periphery.
What is the end goal that BD has in mind? Yet another Police/Military toy?
Fake 3D Video.