Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

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>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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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