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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Google regret selling Boston Dynamics? It was a interesting proposition at the time - self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot (charging from the van's traction battery between deliveries) for the last few steps from van to door etc. Ahead of its time perhaps ... but these days perhaps that will become viable again "soon"?

At least they didn't kill it I guess and BD got to live on as an independent.

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The problem with hardware is that it's always viable soon, but not quite yet. Hardware is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult than anticipated, the fact that the richest companies in the world can't quite make it work is a testament to that. In my mind, hardware moonshots are kind of like trying to embed Doom in a SharePoint Framework Extension while high on psilocybin — impressive if someone manages to pull it off, but not for the sane of mind.

The big time suck I see with robotic anything is that simulation for training will only take it so far...eventually it needs to be in the real world, making mistakes, and this comes with far more red tape and much higher risk, slowing down the process. I don't see hardware as the bottleneck, its software and hardware working together in an environment where the stakes are much higher than just in the lab.

I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China? And to a pretty good extend the U.S. Of course there is a curve which plots dexterity (hardware) and resulting capability, but we don't need /that/ much dexterity for some jobs. We have tele-operated humanoids 'doing things' where it is self evident that the bottleneck is the ability of the robot to act autonomously, not its hardware.

>I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China?

Humanoid robot Olympic Games in China:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE

Also, reminded - Russian "localization" (typical Russian hi-tech today, especially when on government investment, is simple rebadge of a Chinese tech) - even good Chinese robots starts to fall like drunk:

https://youtu.be/WVKxw72vlmo?t=15

and for the GGP comment:

>self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot

why humanoid? Glorified Roomba-like robots would do such job just fine. Every time seeing how the Amazon driver parks his van and runs around in our complex placing packages in front of the doors and making photos of the placed packages i'm wondering why Amazon wouldn't use 5-10 such Roombas per van instead. (and every time i think that i have to make such a startup myself, and after that i immediately think that Amazon would easily beat me by developing it 100x faster - in a week where i'd spend 2 years - and so i don't do it, and Amazon apparently doesn't do it too)

Many houses don't have flat approaches, our definitely doesn't. Whatever delivers a package to our town home at least needs to navigate paver stones. Dog bots could probably do it though.

The simple reason why they don’t do it: It has to be 100% reliable. Robots get stuck, need charge, software has bugs, … So your fleet of robots would need supervision. Probably for years to come. And a human driver only costs like 70-80k a year.

A human supervisor monitoring 10 or more vehicles and unstuck them in case will also not cost more per year.

Yeah, but this requires good teleoperator infrastructure. You can’t unstuck a robot that loses connection. There are just a lot of things that can go wrong. And an entire car being stuck and waiting for someone to come is also not cheap. I am pretty sure Amazon (one of the biggest robotics company on the planet btw) has done the math.

The point of machine learning based systems (imo) is that they aren't 100% reliable.

Idk where people are getting the idea that systems designed to mimic biological brains will have machinelike precision whilst also being flexible to adapt to new situations.

> why humanoid? Glorified Roomba-like robots would do such job just fine.

Steps. Garden gates. Uneven surfaces. Communal entrances.

The real world is messy and certainly not flat.

Some sort of wheeled-legged-centaur type robot might work though.

Deliveries are probably one of the few legitimate applications for humanoid robots, but even then 99% of the work is done on wheels and the robot is just there to ring a bell, open a door and climb stairs.

This is probably something people don't understand about humanoid robots. Nobody is dumb enough to replace their CNC machines with humanoid robots holding power tools and yet that is what you're being sold on when Elon Musk is teasing a trillion dollar valuation.

Instead, the vast majority of humanoids will be used for pretty boring FedEx or door dash style logistics work, not much different from wheeled robots.

Every single attempt at lifelike autonomous hardware over the last few decades has been a bottomless money pit, and despite all the recent advances the entire field is yet to be proven. A partnership with a robotics company is probably the best outcome for Google at this stage, because it will let them focus on what they do best - software

Humans are often really good at unstandardized tasks that require a lot of physical manipulation even when they're considered "unskilled" or at least blue collar. I think of so many things I pay people to do with respect to my house and the idea that autonomous hardware could handle pretty much any of them is pretty much laughable.

There are probably some exceptions. I can imagine robo lawnmowers getting good enough to handle my yard at some point if not adjacent cleanup. But doing a monthly housecleaning? Don't think so. (And a Roomba really wouldn't be very useful; it's barely useful at my brother's house that is practically built for a Roomba.)

I agree completely with this.

However, houses and things inside it were designed by humans for humans, for either aesthetic or 'easy for humans to do' reasons. I sometimes wonder then what if they were designed from the ground up with let's call it 'robot repairability'/automation in mind. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I'd imagine a lot more modular, a lot more brutalist/uglier, and probably a lot more expensive. But it's an interesting thing to think about nonetheless.

I see a future where some humanoid robot mows the lawn, picks up trash, puts the bins outside weekly, vacuums the house, loads the dishwasher, does the clothes washing. While not actively doing those things, it will plug itself in and be passive security.

They will need help doing the finer control things, and they won't do everything. But definitely useful enough, especially for older folk.

I have a town home, so not ideal for a Roomba but...I have a Eufy now and having it (mostly) mop/(some) vacuum my kitchen/living room every night has been a huge improvement to keeping the floor clean (before something gets stuck on it between when I can do it on the weekend).

Chinese tech has come a long way in the last 5 years. Roomba just went bankrupt for a good reason.

Yes even lifts, pickers, etc are in the realm of not having financial-econ impact for the groups that have invested or bought them.

I don't think that's true at all. I had warehouse experience before going into software and automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) such as the mini-load type systems are vastly impactful. They are far superior to forklift based retrieval or worse still, human picking.

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