Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Bipedal robots are dumb.

A robot that can only walk around my house is still useless. A robot that can wheel or track or even park in front of my dryer and fold laundry would be incredible. Yet every demo is Robot Jumps And Dances, not Robot Does Something Useful.

My theory is that bipedal motion is the "easy" problem, and fine motor control is the hard problem. That makes me bearish on Optimus: A car with questionable full self driving is still a useful car. A robot with questionable fine motor control is going to break every dish in the house.

View on HN

It seems very rational to assume bipedal motion is easy and fine control is difficult. Some babies can walk from 9 months. No 9 month olds are playing Beethoven's 5th on the Piano.

A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.

There was millions of years of very strong selective pressure making humans evolve to learn to walk easily. There has been very little selective pressure making humans be good at learning tic tac toe.

Often whether something seems difficult or easy to humans has more to do with how well evolution has prepared us for it than with the inherent difficulty of the problem.

Bipedal robots are an easy drop-in replacement for humans. It just becomes a software problem for them to do any task we do- your tracks are fun until you want the robot to drive your car, walk around the side of the house, or even go up the stairs.

> Bipedal robots are an easy drop-in replacement for humans.

Robots that merely walk around are just as useless as humans who merely walk around.

A robot that folds laundry would be useful even if it was built into the washing machine.

The legs are not important. The arms are important. Show me the arms doing something useful, if you can.

Why would I show you arms of current robots doing something useful? You said "Bipedal robots are dumb" and that's all I talked about.

Read the whole message.

Here's a figure robot unloading the dishwasher https://x.com/chatgpt21/status/2016210798884815156

Progress! First robot demo of something useful.

Still, whoever puts this robot on a wheeled chassis for half the price, twice the battery life, and 3X the reliability is going to own the market.

Chinese manufacturers were recently reporting that people were twice as efficient as humanoid robots

Twice as efficient is an incredible achievement if you think that a few years ago humanoid robots struggled to stay upright and couldn't locate their own... well, charging port.

In my house, the bedrooms are two flights of stairs above the dryer in the basement. Good luck wheeling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com