Comment by proee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by proee | Hacker News Reader

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It depends on the battery life. If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense. Creating a removable battery pack adds extra weight and gives the designers less freedom to place the battery pack exactly where it needs to be in the robot frame, or distribute the cells across the frame in strategic locations.

Also, the charge rate matters. If robot can charge to 80% in say 30 minutes, then it can take small charging breaks during the day between critical tasks.

Also, if the feet have inductive chargers, it's possible to place the robot on a large charging mat that allows it to run indefinitely, like in a factory environment. If your robot takes 30 minutes to fold the laundry or do dishes, why not place a charging mat at these locations so it can work and charge at the same time.

In the future, new homes might include charging coils embedded in the floor every 12 inches so that your robots can work all day.

> If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense.

If your employees are robots why would you be shutting down at night?

Almost all of those points are applicable for the battery pack as well. There should be virtually no weight difference, other than the design limitation which is a valid concern.

I suppose an external battery pack adds the bonus of doing a hard shutdown, in the case it decides to go rogue. Though getting to the battery pack might be hard if it resists you.

https://www.figure.ai/figure says 5 hour battery life. No mention of charge rate.

Yeah so in 2-4 years you can throw out your whole expensive robot because battery wears out? I hate this argument that just to be a bit thinner, the whole device has to be be made throwaway.

People do that with phones. Given that humanoid robots are very early in their development cycle why wouldn't they need to be replaced physically?

Joints will need replacement, lubrication, other maintenance. Same with motors, so why not replacing power/battery as part of a part?

It's not about making them "thinner". The idea is that they are human sized, because they're designed to operate in human occupied areas.

The first places are going to be like Amazon warehouses doing pick and pack because of the speed and all the variations of boxes and packages.

That's a relatively controlled environment, they'll evolve from there.

Talking about the thinness of a humanoid, maid robot is pretty hilarious.

Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.

That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.

The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.

Bollocks. I wouldn’t care if it looked like Chewbacca if it did the household chores, had a good warranty and was repairable, and cost under $30k.

I’m not f##king the robot maid, I don’t care if it looks like a girl. If I was into that, there are other types of ‘robots’ for that.

I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, wants to fuck their robot maid, I'm saying thousands of years of patriarchy, hundreds of years of popular culture, fetishization of domestic labor roles and simple human nature will have an influence on the adoption of humanoid domestic robots that companies ignore at their peril.

Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression. The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people. It doesn't even have a face, it doesn't look pleasant, it doesn't invite an emotional bond, it isn't friend shaped, and that isn't what most people will want, or would spend money on, regardless of how efficient it is.

Humanoid robots will have a context within the same gender and cultural dynamics as human beings, by virtue of looking and acting human enough. People already have relationships with AI, and that will only become more normalized over time. Most people will personify and anthropomorphize humanoid robots just as much as they do AI, and this will be necessary for their popular acceptance and adoption. And yes, many people will want to fuck them, or at the very least, want them to look fuckable.

> Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression.

They sell a ton of Civics, and even more of the kind of boring-ass SUV like a Nissan Muranos and Ford Escapes. None of these are the 'sexy' cars you describe. True, individual Lamborghinis sell for an order of magnitude more than a Murano and are sexy cars, but your original comment suggests that only an aesthetically sexy robot maid would be "popular." Would a sexy robot maid be a sensation? I bet it would, but I just don't think adoption is waiting on that necessarily. Rather, usefulness and 'right price' are the current barriers.

> The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people.

Hard agree, it's for sure gross looking. They could do a lot better by literally just letting an animator design a cute cartoon face to put on a cheap screen. If anybody wants the weirdo look pictured there they can just turn the screen off.

People already buy robot vacuums to do a decent job of vacuuming a decent amount of their floors. It is a $4.48 billion industry. Roombas don't look like people. They don't even look like pets or animals. They look like big hockey pucks. I have one and I have it run as soon as I leave for work because I don't want to interact with it, I want to have clean floors. If there was a robot that could fold clothes, load and unload the dishwasher, dust, and general purpose clean, I would have it run when I wasn't home too and would prefer if it folded up into a little box in the corner when I was home.

Roomba uses AI in some of their models, but people aren't trying to have a relationship with them. Because it is AI to serve a utilitarian purpose that does not involve imitating human behavior. People have relationships with chatbots because they are specifically imitating human behavior. Putting googly eyes on your Roomba isn’t the same as falling in love with a chatbot.

Cars are very very publicly visible, so they are used to project some sort of image to others; like the clothes people wear. Most people don't wear clothes or drive cars for purely utilitarian purposes. Often people will buy clothes or cars that look utilitarian to project an image about themselves. People buy furniture and decorate their homes to project an image. People do not buy their water heater to project a certain image about themselves. Robot vacuums are frustrating to watch. They get the job done in the end (most of the time) but their random zig zags or difficulty navigating around objects is something most people don’t want to see. They just want the result. Huminoid robots will be like that for a significant amount of time, where they can empty the dishwasher, but it will be painfully slow, odd looking, and very unhuman-like. People won’t want to see this but they will want the job done so they don’t have to do it. A robot that can perform utilitarian household chores would be a huge industry and would be used by most people like a dishwasher or water heater, primarily for its utility.

A robot that reaches the level that it could be a companion, operating visibly with/around people (bringing you and your guests refreshments rather than slowly, awkwardly folding clothes alone in a bedroom while you are at work or downstairs watching a movie) would very likely have a huge pressure to fit cultural and gender dynamics.

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