Toddlerbot: Open-Source Humanoid Robot | Hacker News Reader

Toddlerbot: Open-Source Humanoid Robot

toddlerbot.github.io

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Super impressive work! Can't wait for these to be a little more budget friendly so that it would be viable for small hacking around the house.

The cartwheel fails are pretty brutal, it never learned how to catch itself and break its own fall. Cartwheel is a remarkable demo, I initially thought it was a joke and fake until I saw the blooper reel. Now I half believe it.

Those bots never learn by themselves. It's same as how animations on beautiful LPs don't write themselves. They're all "fake" in that sense, but also "real" in the sense that they would not be just gifs or mp4s but callbacks would be firing and running on customer browsers.

Figuring out the meaning of the acronym "LP"s will be for the archeologists to decipher, I suppose.

EDIT: Future archeologist here (3 minutes after posting). It stands for "Live Performance", which is an unnecessarily obscure way of saying something that isn't obvious from the context alone.

EDIT2: Or it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record

I think they meant Landing Page but I was also confused for awhile.

> Toddler

> Does a perfect Cartwheel in the first clip

Damn clankers ’roid their babies.

Super cool work!! How much of a limitation is it to have the robot be basically 3D-printable? Though I can see it's basically required for making it buildable by others.

Is there a cheaper/starter version, can still use Jetson nano but the rest of the BOM is more starter friendly :)

This is Cool! Do we have Mujoco Sim available for doing further research using VLA.

I have visions of buying/building one to feed my cats and bring packages from my porch, is this crazy ambitious?

Edit: Just seen that 'low cost' means $6k, LMAO

That depends. If you put the catfood in a robot friendly container that is a lot easier than getting the robot to scope if out of the bag. Can you train the delivery company (driver or robots) to place packages in a specific location on the porch - hunting a package down is hard, unless the package is a standard package that is somehow designed to be easy to locate (there are a lot of options here, but you and the packager must agree on using it).

In large part what makes this crazy ambitious is not that it can't be done it is that you need to program all the details and minor variations in environment mean the robot can't do anything. It is easy to program a robot to move 5cm, it is hard to program it to identify random items that are placed in random locations. Things are getting better, but this is a hard problem.

Automated cat feeders already exist, we have a water fountain, a kibble feeder than needs monthly refill and a wet food feeder that is stocked once per day.

And package dropboxes also exist.

Not every problem needs to be solved by humanoid robots. (Almost no problem needs to be solved by humanoid robots actually)

> Almost bo problem...

I've heard this before but I don't think I believe it. I spend many hours every week 1. picking up clutter and putting it away 2. sorting clean clothes into drawers (I have a family of 5) and 3. shuttling dishes to/from the dishwasher.

I would pay quite a bit of money to stop doing those things. Especially #1. Is there a simple non-humanoid automation I'm missing?

> Is there a simple non-humanoid automation I'm missing?

Yeah, just hire someone to do that for you. It will probably cost far less than " quite a bit of money".

That depends on where you live.

In India you can pay people to do this for less than $1/day. My coworkers there generally are paying 2 people that price even though there isn't enough work to keep even one busy - that way if one servant quits they don't have to do the work themselves.

For me I'd have to pay something like $30/hour after you account for taxes, their take-home would be in the $15-20/hour range. I'd also have to learn a foreign language because almost nobody who speaks English (or even Spanish) will accept a part time job making that little part time. I'd need an accountant to figure out the exact price of course so more cost but lets just work with $30/hour. It would cost me nearly $10,000 per year to have such a servant in the US, and the only reason it is less is I can expect servants to quit often enough that I never have one for the full year as they find other jobs that are better (30*365 = 10950 if they work every day)

That is why so many Americans (and Europeans) want robots - there are a lot of tedious things that we are doing ourselves that we would love to have someone else do but labor is so expensive we can't afford it. Even if you live below the poverty line in these countries you realistically have a rich lifestyle in many ways - HVAC, lights, smart phones... modern life as provided many luxuries that kings of the past couldn't get (don't get me wrong, life for the poor is hard despite those luxuries)

6k is on a bit expensive side for a toddler sized servo bots but cheaper than most Chinese robot dogs. Robots are crazy expensive.

I thought so too, but those aren't normal hobby servos, they are these things [0] at $100-300 a pop. and there are like 20 of them

[0] - https://www.robotis.us/xc/

That depends on what this can do. 6k would be a price I pay if it can do enough. I already have a $500 robot vacuum - which cannot do stairs and I have to carry it if I want it to do a different floor, so already $1000 is reasonable if all it is is a robot vacuum that can do stairs. If it can do things like fold and put away laundry, or load/unload the dishwasher (or wash dishes?). Can it put away the toys my kids leave all over (and also save me the bother of putting my toys away when I'm done)?