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dmix

Seems to be this European robotics company

https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...

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My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.

90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.

You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.

Cars are in the intersection where you have large parts that need to be moved around where other things happen with them and large scale of standard designs that is worth automating.

I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.

Vertically upright humanoids have a lot going for them: they don't occupy a lot of floor space, they can pull an object right into their center of gravity to manipulate it, and because they're familiar they're relatively easy to prototype actions for because they're our actions.

People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.

I remember back in the 90s hearing about a manufacturing paradox. Robots can reduce costs but for them to work you have to carry out extra design for manufacturing that simplifies the required tasks.

The paradox is that now you've simplified the process humans can also do it more efficiently and cheaply. The capital expense of robots doesn't really cost in compared to human production line.

There are exceptions. In the car industry you're moving heavy things with a high requirement for precision. I've also seen robots used for cleaning mouse cages in bioinformatics laboratories. There it's because handling large amounts of hazardous waste safely is inefficient for humans.

I wonder, how long will cheap human labour stay competitive for small consumer products compared to AI driven systems?

> I wonder, how long will cheap human labour stay competitive for small consumer products compared to AI driven systems?

And if they are made redundant by automation, how will economy or even society function. Currently everything revolves around work.

You reminded me of the hilarious SV pizza making robot startup which has its own robot arm.

In this video you see the unnecessary robot arm move the pizza to the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN45bTsBUW8

For contrast a How it is Made video of frozen pizzas being created at dozens (hundreds?) per minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrSIOtv8a0

The difference is they can be put into environments that do not allow for purpose robots. I don't think it is a bad idea that spaces are still made for humans for when something goes wrong. A frozen pizza factory is trying to solve and sell something different.

It’s a fun Vegas vending machine gimmick, but if I go to nice pizzeria I'd prefer my pizza be made by a human. Am I missing other use cases?

I agree and for me personally this is very easy to see and understand.

Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.

I don't disagree with the general utility of humanoid (or other multipurpose) robots, just not in a factory setting.

I think automating stuff in the factory makes zero sense - its a controlled environment with purpose designed tooling where anything that makes sense to automate has been automated. All the extra work will only result in marginal gains.

It's automating the stuff that goes on outside of the factories - for example construction imo is about almost as labor intensive as it was a century ago, the marginal gains were offset by more complex building techniques and higher expectations.

Housing is also just about the most valuable thing that exists in every country.

Because so much infrastructure is in humanoid form. If you can make something that can manipulate two hands on arms that are positioned and moved like human arms, you could just put that torso into a lot of situations to replace a human without a lot of retooling. That's the dream I think.

Installing humanoid robots in a factory is like using regexes to parse data.

It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.

Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.

Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.

I personally think humans make the mistake of thinking that we must create objects that emulate oneself. Imagination is tough, I know.

Does the computer 'memory' behave identically like human memory? Of course not. Does it look like the 'memory' of a human? Again, of course not.

I toured a major US OEM assembly plant recently, and there were a TON of humans working insanely repetitive tasks.

The most kind numbing of all were the easiest (sit in chair and put bolts upright in holder so robot can pick them up) and the highest paid thanks to union seniority.

The UAW will kill all the US OEMs before that let robots replace all the humans.

Many of the largest US auto assembly plants aren't unionized.

All of the robot arms where I work are stood idle. Humans are so much more agile, so much more adaptable, so much easier to train, give better feedback, their moving parts last much longer. We focus instead on making the humans as productive as they can be, MES, kitted parts, intelligent tools etc.

Edit: We do have robots btw. But they are not arms. They are super specialised, high precision machines that are designed to do a job humanoids could not

Hexagon is very prominent in precision manufacturing through their dimensional measurement robots (CMM Coordinate Measurement Machine) and other metrology software/hardware. This is most likely why they were chosen by BMW, as I imagine they already have a working relationship together, although the EU aspect could have contributed as well.

I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.

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