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Comment by yakbarber | Hacker News Reader

In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere, doing all sorts of chores for us. They’re going to need hands.

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I'd consider hands to be more important than bipedal mobility.

I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens.

Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present.

In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.

Yes, thats your current perspective. But by the time you get programmers, the whole company will be automated

I remember a certain public personality who is very big on bipedal humanoid robots these days also promising us that we'd have truly autonomous self driving cars from his company by 2022, or 2023. It's now 2026.

We can debate the meaning of “truly autonomous”, but the Tesla-owning friends and acquaintances of mine have all, without any uncertainty, recently commented to me that the top-tier self-driving plan in the modern Teslas is just that.

One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.

Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions. Just look at the difference between the telsa robotaxi performance vs Waymo. Only one of them is truly FSD.

> Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions

Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control.

Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.

Today, Tesla's so-called full self-driving system is legally classified as SAE Level 2 driver assistance [1]. The human driver must continuously monitor the system, be ready to take over instantly at any time, and is legally responsible for the the car. Tesla is careful to avoid any liability for this by stating this somewhere, perhaps in a 3-point font.

Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot

I hate how they are able to avoid liability like this. No human can sit in a car doing literally nothing but being alert ready to take over in an instant. Thats not how brains work. This is obvious but they use this excuse to divert any blame from the automated system to the occupant.

To add context, his first predictions are from 2013. And some of those predictions had 2018 as a goal.

That’s an incredibly optimistic timeline.

Slowly, then all at once.

Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them. The internet was tiny, then everywhere. Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them. GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them.

This is how things playout time and time again.

Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.

It took almost 20 years from computers that nobody brought on electronics and photography stores to computers in everybody's desk.

Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.

Mostly just the cost, yeah. It will be like buying a car. The economics will have to make sense for regular people, while it starts popping up in tons of places and become a status symbol.

robots have existed for more than 20 years though. Boston Dynamic's dog is 22 years old, Atlas 15-ish

What can I as a normal person use these robots for?

Nothing. They were designed for the military.

And what do the military use them for?

Supposedly as a sort of extremely expensive but basically tireless mule.

Computers also existed for more than 20 years before they started being sold to end-users.

And again, the robots market will probably not evolve anything near as fast as the computers.

We have had more than 10 years of robotic vacuums and yet they are still a fairly niche product.

Digital computers existed for ~10-20 years before hitting the consumer market. It took almost a half-century for the microprocessor to become a ubiquitous appliance.

We’re already seeing huge progress in humanoids coming from china. The big problem is software and world understanding, but the data collection from today’s humanoids and the rush to capitalize on their potential now that manufacturing their form is largely solved (save for hands) will see these problems overcome.

I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.

So, after they work out all the mechanical kinks (there are quite a few!), and after they work out all the software issues (again, many of them), the last problem is the biggest: production. Anyone can make a half dozen robots by hand. A hundred thousand is a completely different challenge. If they can't be made efficiently, their cost makes them more of a toy than a tool.

One of the Tesla's factories is winding down car production in a plan to convert to producing humanoid robots.

I can buy China doing it, but not Tesla. They have a terrible track record of production, nothing even close to China's capability. In the past they've "developed" factories by taking huge government incentives and then basically doing nothing with them and pocketing the cash.

Is that because they're close to building robots or because Chinese EVs are eating their lunch and Tesla is flatlining?

The line between moonshot and scam is thin and elon is known for doing jumping jacks on it.

Explain again why you are so proud to be racist and easily manipulated.

You need to recalibrate your bullshit sensor, because that statement from Tesla is clearly a farce.

Have you seen the mass produced humanoids from China? They’re incredibly capable (again, save for hands which is a huge mechanical and software problem) and cheap.

https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo https://youtu.be/GzX1qOIO1bE

Deliveries use hands because humans have hands, not because hands are a prerequisite for deliveries. Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands. Humans are useful because of our brains, because we can adapt to almost any situation for very little cost. Humanoid robots will remain a novelty until the cost is reduced far beyond what is plausible.

How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.

> Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands.

And yet we haven’t seen widespread adoption because they can’t handle stairs, steep slopes, streets without sidewalks, sidewalks with mud, or a hundred other real world challenges

We haven’t seen widespread adoption because they can’t hope to compete with human delivery drivers on cost. The cost to DoorDash and Uber Eats of a delivery driver is nothing upfront and a few dollars per delivery. The cost of a delivery robot is thousands of dollars upfront and more per delivery. Stairs aren’t even in the top 10 problems these robots face, they’re more than capable of delivering to most customers already.

I predict that we'll see limited combat use of the latest Chinese bipedal robots within two years. They'll sell to both Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine already has UGVs and they're tracked or wheeled. I can't imagine bipedal robots being cost efficient for 99% of missions in the near future.

Right, the wheeled and tracked units are more cost efficient. But there are some mission sets and terrains for which bipedal robots will be more effective. Everything is going to get tested to see what works.

While I agree we'll see millions of bipedal robots, it won't be because they're doing our chores. People will buy them for the same reason I'd want one today: They're fun toys.

It's been 10 years since Boston Dynamics released this impressive video of Atlas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

Even though today's robots are vastly more sophisticated, the progress of the last decade shows we shouldn't expect a sudden revolution in their abilities over the next ten years. As is often the case, solving those final few challenges that really make a difference always takes the longest.

> In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere

No, there won't be, and I have no clue why you think this is true. It's been more than 15 years since the first demos of self-driving cars, a much easier problem than useful bipedal robots coexisting in spaces made for humans, and self-driving cars are still hardly anywhere, despite the breathless predictions 15 years ago that all cars and trucks everywhere would be self-driving as of what is now 5 years ago.

The bipedal robot thing is interesting, but there's only two places their cost makes sense: industry and war. After war makes them cheap to mass-produce (because an army of robots needs to be sustainable), then they'll be affordable. But they'll still be highly regulated, mostly as a political reaction to "losing jobs". It will probably take 30+ years for us to get to that point, because wars big enough to invest that much expense and manpower aren't common.

Chinese Unitree already makes humanoids for $5K. Cheap enough for average american family to afford if it's useful. Several batteries and automatic replacement station will make it run 24/7 non-stop.

So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.

That is interesting, but it looks like the ones used for practical work are $30k. Still, they're targeting 20k units this year, which is a lot more production and a lower price than I imagined they'd be at by now.

At least it's obvious we are close to have cheap mechanically capable robots. As soon as they get smart enough to be useful mass production will begin. We are almost there. (Un)fortunately China is leading here. With all production there it will be hard for US companies to compete. Especially outside of US market.

"Especially outside of US market."

A euphemism in polite company for: we'll ban them on national security grounds like we did with cars and phones.

It's getting complicated here. Likely robots will be connected. This makes them perfect for spying and sabotaging. US cannot let China control them. Likely EU will do the same.

If not connected they can be used for numerous criminal activities. Stealing, selling drugs on the streets, etc. Armed robberies will be impressive.

So, my guess is robots will be connected, and this will be enforced in software and, may be, hardware. To the point that makes them almost unhackable. However it should be possible to take the frame and low level electronics (like motor controllers), and fit it with custom high level compute module and software. It will be just quite a lot of work. Still can be done by community of enthusiasts.

Also medical / elderly care. A large market.

As someone in the robotics, I can tell you that’s never gonna happen, even if you see a fully functional demo of a robot (not just the typical money grab 3D renders), assume the real life performance are 10x worse.. there’s so much monkey business in robotics, plenty of over promising, so much empty hypes, that been going on for years, the only successful breeds are cobotics (like roomba and industrial manipulators) or recently drones, although still very limited due to endurance.

Why bipedal?

Because the human world is built for bipedal beings and everything else will encounter obstacles somewhere.

Dogs and cats don't complain. Gorillas and chimpanzee should be fine too.

Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.

Yeah, I think 4+ legged bots should be more common than 2 leg variants. 2 legs is neat, but takes far more work and processing to control and balanced. It also requires much more powerful legs, a spider bot has more legs which makes it more "complex" in some ways, but individual legs don't need to hold and maneuver its entire body weight alone and it can hold 3 points of ground contact at all times, even when moving around, making it exceptionally stable. A bipedal robot has to be able to hold like twice its own body weight or more in order to balance and maneuver on a single foot in order to walk around and navigate obstacles.

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