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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037·

You raise a great point. And the Amazon picking staff are onshore in wealthy countries. I guess the minimum wage paid by Amazon is around 15 USD per hour.

I wonder: Is the task of automating this work primaryly difficult in vision or dexterity (motion)? Or maybe they are equally difficult for different reasons.

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Probably both vision and dexterity, and the first mistake we make as roboticists/engineers might be to distinguish the two like they're separate problems to solve or that a solution exists where the two live a separate life.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

Agreed. The solution will likely be some vision foundation model that directly sends controls to the robot ("move here, grab, move there"), trained by Amazon with RL to integrate collision avoidance, object detection, grasping point detection, grasp verification etc.

If we're talking about picking objects at random from one bin and putting it in another, I don't need my eyes to do that. Proprioception (shape and location) and touch (texture) are enough to do that.

But we still don’t have good sensors for this, so our robots try to rely on vision.

You need those anyway to know how much grip to apply and how to hold on to the object. You can't determine that visually.

Nah, your robot visually determines what it’s grabbing, then looks in a database for the best grip.

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