It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor.
What remains unautomated, then?
The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditional robots.
This is where this new generation of robotics comes in. This is the kind of task they're designed to do: "a task that's still done by a human in a high automation environment". Universal robots are angling for the tasks that are impossible or uneconomical to automate with traditional industrial robots.
The only thing I can think of are tasks that are so rarely done, it's not economical to build a robot for. But I then I also don't see how another robot solves this problem.
B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.
The point is, human shape plus general purpose intelligence is an amazing combination to resolve the “long tail”.
Without the intelligence part, the body is useless.
Perhaps Boston Dynamics has that part resolved now too.
But the rest of the human body is not useful in a factory environment, so the arms could be mounted on a mobile base that does not have any resemblance to a human.
I dunno, a legged design is pretty useful for navigating complex environments. The arms and legs have to attach to something so you've still got some sort of torso. About the only thing you can easily do away with is the head I think.
But certainly a bipedal design seems unnecessarily complicated unless you need it to climb ladders inside narrow tubes or something similarly specific. I feel like a quadruped with 4+ arms mounted on top and many-jointed fingers might be ideal (both in terms of utility and also creepiness).
But of course the wheels could be replaced with feet where that's needed.
Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather.
Robots can certainly do things more repeatably, if not more precisely.
One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines.
The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.
A robot that has to be carefully adapted and set up for the task vs a robot that you can point at a task and have it figure out how to do it. A robot that doesn't deviate vs a robot that absorbs all kinds of deviations.
It's a bet that The Bitter Lesson will win over Moravec's Paradox, in the end.
If I were Hyundai, I'd be looking at this as buying a significant amount of vision, dynamics, and integration systems expertise, not necessarily the dream of self-motive walking systems.
That's exactly the reason why it's usually a bad idea to run a classical robot on a neural controller. If atlas bumps into something you get a small bump and maybe a broken atlas. Your average industrial robotic arm will happily yeet whatever it bumps into across the room.
Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.
All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
The comic strip is saying if above is true, then people still have to learn at some point so on average it would be around 10k people per day.
I think the math is this:
For people born in a given year: 4000000/365/30 = 365 people per day
but you have 30 sets of those people (those born this year, those born last year, those born two years ago, etc.) So 365 * 30 = 10950. 10k is easier to say for viral purposes.
Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/fixed gantry. Wheeled mobile manipulators are only needed in a few cases, and humanoid form-factor is only "necessary" in very few cases (and I don't think the current crop of humanoids is particularly suited to these tasks).
In my opinion/experience, the impediments are that (1) the system integrators that are usually responsible for assembly-line robotics are too stupid to figure out how to apply robots to the problem, (2) the automakers themselves are often too short-sighted/stupid/unwilling to invest in increased automation (and particularly in building the in-house competency that they really need), (3) the hostile/exploitative relationship between (most) automakers and their main suppliers means that low-hanging improvements to parts/assemblies are a non-starter, and (4) the automaker C-suite (and investors) are too drawn to silver-bullet solutions (e.g. humanoids) than practical automation improvements.
An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind.
I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
Libraries are typically either governed by a municipality's rules around employment and treatment of employees, or part of a school/etc where there are again additional guidelines about these things to be sensible and not leading people into unsafe behavior.
Wouldn’t that just be “ionized”?
Things have been moving pretty fast in the last year when it comes to semi-bipedal robots doing the long tail of previously unreachable tasks.
This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* automation.
* There is a significant split in automation between "body weld" stages and "assembly" stages. Body weld is very heavily automated basically everywhere (although there are some surprising exceptions in places), while assembly is much less automated.
Ford isn't a tech company, they don't even make their own robots. They buy them from someone else. What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
If you had any auto industry experience, you would know that the people responsible for the design and build of the physical car and the people responsible for the user-facing software are very separate (in fact, the user-facing software might be entirely contracted out).
> What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
You do realize how laughable this position is, commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company that they already effectively owned. Do you really think that somewhow between owning BD and their partnership with GDM that no-one in the entire corporate structure of Hyundai is aware of the state of the art in robotics?
enhance:
>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying
ENHANCE:
>buying
It does not support your point to show that Hyundai is purchasing the company that actually built the robots.
If you want to make your point about how laughable it is that companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots, you should probably not prove it with a company that essentially achieved world-largest-status before even finishing their straight-up purchase of this knowledge and tech.
I think you've gotten hung up on the idea that making robots is the essential part of the problem. I'm not going to go as far as much of the ML community and say that making hardware is secondary, but the software side is where most of the latest and greatest work is happening. Better hardware is not going to magically solve all the outstanding problems of manipulation. Better software might solve them entirely independent of hardware so long as the hardware is "good enough". I think there is a general sense that the field that robotics is approaching the equivalent on the mid 2000's with respect to computing architectures - there are still first-party RISC UNIX workstations on the market (e.g. Apple, IBM, Sun) but the incoming tide of commodity x86 platforms is clear for all to see. There are still some gains to be had by designing everything in-house, but the marginal gains versus off-the-shelf components or even full systems are steadily narrowing. There is every reason to believe that COTS hardware capabilities will continue to mature and become more commoditized.
Of course, the purchase here that actually mattered happened several years ago; this headline is just the final piece. BD and Hyundai have been working fairly closely on Altas applications to auto manufacturing for some time, never mind the additional research being done at BDAII/RAII.
The west may have to change in the future.
> I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Luckily for you, my job has always been within the robotics research side of the company, so I am very much aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the current technology.
Indeed, Ford. Leaving aside the "old school" six axis robots that have been around for decades, Ford absolutely uses UR10s collaborating with humans to sand the entire car body in about 30 seconds, and to fit shock absorbers. They're also used at the engine plants. They also use the Symbio platform for transmission assembly, and fully autonomous forklift robots throughout their Tennessee plant.
Agreed, and hence I suggested an amazon warehouse tour (they offer one for their flagship robotics 'research' warehouse) to anyone, or a Tesla factory tour (might need to talk to someone, fairly manageable).
This reminds me of the quote, "the future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."
Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.
At a certain point, the tasks that remain stop being "dexterity" problems and start being "AI" problems. That is: a robot could do the task - if you either spent big $$$ on redesigning the entire task around the robot's intellectual limitations (uneconomical), or if you had an incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving driving that robot (impossible with 00s AI).
The "universal robot" bet is the "incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving" bet. That in 2020s, AI is finally capable. The body only has to be "good enough to make most tasks possible".
The auto industry is notorious for making incredibly myopic choices to save money/make money in the near term versus long-term investments. The relationship between automakers and their suppliers/vendors is basically a century-plus of the automakers trying to (1) outsource anything they can for a quick buck, and (2) grind the supplier/vendor margins down to nothing. (This is part of why the newer Chinese automakers with much greater vertical integration are such a threat to the traditional automakers; vertical integration has a high up-front investment but the payoff in flexibility and speed is significant).
The name of the reason is: corporate rot. They don't have the organizational backbone that wouldn't let their "in-house manufacturing" rot away into inefficiency and waste.
Not that it has much to do with why automation fails to penetrate certain tasks. The reason why "long tail" tasks are often beyond automation is: piss poor ROI, calculated correctly.
You go out of your way to automate a certain process with traditional robotics, and it'll probably pay off in 15 years. The chassis this applies to is going to be in manufacturing for 10 years. At least half the systems work you've done there would have to be redone for the next chassis. Fun.
The bean counters counted their beans, and found out that using traditional robotics there is a losing game. Thus the search for better options. And the humans performing the tasks in the meanwhile.
I actually don't think any of the big automakers have ever really, in-depth considered the ROI of "traditional" assembly automation (i.e. anything SoTA pre-2020), with experts in all parts of the process in same room. It's easy to assume that these companies must make careful measured decisions based on evidence, but in practice big decisions are made by small groups within the C-suite, often pretty divorced from the reality on the ground.
For example, many of the big asian automakers seem to have completely ignored the well-understood effects of their demographic crises (i.e. significantly aging population) on the future of their workforce (i.e. they are having trouble retaining and hiring new workers as the older generation retires) and this totally changes the economics of automation! Now they are all having to play catch-up, having realized that they must automate, at whatever the cost, because the issue is not "robots must be cheaper than human labor" it is "we might not be able to afford human labor at all".
And the tasks that change from day to day.
>What remains unautomated, then?
Stuff that can be done by purpose specific robot arms on wheeled platforms, which is very difficult, but will be much more feasible than a humanoid robot doing anything.
You can't put a robot arm on a wheeled platform without making the platform very heavy otherwise the whole thing will topple over. This gives your entire assembly a mandatory floor space requirement that may be quite large, and severely constrains how much reach you have (see the Handle robot from BD itself).
A platform like the Segway with a self-balancing system can help with this, but since it doesn't have legs it has very little ability to keep the top of the platform steady - all it can do is accelerate around to try and accommodate wobbles, whereas a bipedal robot can simply shuffle it's legs around and keep the top of it's body stable.
It is difficult to build a control system which can do this, but once it's done it's done.
Or a new take on car design with automated production in mind regarding all the wiring and what not (easier said than done, I'm sure many have tried and failed, but eventually someone will succeed).
This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.
Even if I think this has legs, where do the cheap humans go to work after? Where/what are the remaining jobs for all of this displaced labour in both white collar and blue collar worlds? It basically screams UBI. And in a UBI world, the economy looks pretty different and humanoid esque robots start to look either very altruistic or very dystopian depending on how hard the oligarchs don't want things to change.
Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking?
The market becomes more efficient as fewer human beings are needed to create value and move capital. A lot of them are going to die, surplus to requirements. A lot more will be stuck in lives of grinding and meager poverty, probably doing gig work acting as "flesh AI" for less expensive robots or "blood boys" for the rich. But the rich will be very rich indeed.
It won't just be end-stage capitalism killing people, either. The collapse of the knowledge economy, scientific and research institutions and the mass adoption of AI to fill the gap will kill tons of people too, as will the return of diseases like polio and smallpox, and mass starvation as climate change destroys global agriculture, and the normalization of christofascism.
We're almost certainly not getting UBI, at least not in the US. It would help too many black people and immigrants, half the country would secede. We might get something called UBI but only so long as it isn't universal, and has tons of racially biased and religiously motivated means testing and plenty of carve-outs that keep that money flowing to the top, and out of the hand of the "useless eaters."
Lots of things that don't require legs.
Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.
It took 3 decades to get to where we are today witht that. If it takes until 2066 for humanoid robots to arrive, I won't be around to see them, but it also won't be a fantasy by then. I'm hoping it won't take quite that long, but we'll see.
Apple quite literally reheated the idea of VRML with Vision Pro, and we all saw how that went.
My comparison to VRML isn't about technical feasibility; sure, on a long enough timeline, anything is possible. The problem is market fit relative to technical complexity.
On a timeline long enough that humanoids become practical, it is almost certain that we will come up with other technologies along the way - technologies that will do the envisioned jobs of humanoids just as well, if not better than humanoids, and at substantially lower cost.
It's impossible to predict the reality of product market fit for the future. It sucks doing the dishes, even with the washing machine doing the work, so how about the cabinets themselves are the washing machine so you just put dishes back where they came from and they're cleaned by the cabinets. No humanoid robot maid needed.
If we look at cost as the optimization driver, we really have to dig into the nitty-gritty of robotics. The big one is the amount of energy that we exert just standing there versus a humanoid robot just standing there is ridiculous. So then a centar looking thing. Or maybe one point of contact with the ground which is a ball and the machine runs balancing and hopping algorithms. Pogo stick traversal might be most efficient, given enough compute to make it feasible.
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...
Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.
Dishes, laundry, house cleaning, cooking, food prep, organization, lawn work, car repair, home repair, etc etc etc. Expecting purpose built robots for every single task seems ridiculous.
There's half a dozen techno-creationists in this HN submission.
Something these techno-creationists are silent about is the fact that "for human designed" environments require the full intelligence of a human and not just have the limbs of a human. The reason for that is that most of these environments are hardly designed at all and instead rely intensively on extreme levels of human adaptation.
It's like self driving cars. The extreme tail end of things a driver must do is endless. You will have to draw a line somewhere that designates the limits of the robots and the moment you do, you will have to design environments for humanoid robots instead of humans.
The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.
For example, having 3 arms would help a lot of tasks. Or having fingers with twice the length of human fingers and 4 joints on each finger could enable them to switch a headlight bulb on a French car.
Hands are just hard: no one is building good hands yet because the materials science and motors isn't there to do it (see the production Atlas's with the 3 finger grippers).
And of course training data: we have a wealth of examples of how to move a bipedal platform around, but there are no 4-armed humans so you'd be figuring out the balancing from scratch (but it also has the same problem: 4 arms in physics terms is still basically 2: if you lose your balance you'll need to involve both arms to correct it).
Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?
https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+robonaut+video+hand+why...
The gist of it is that all tools on the spacecraft (eg: space-drill, space-coffee-maker, space-airlock) are all designed to fit a gloved human astronaut hand. Waaaaay more complicated to make a robo-hand than a robo-suction cup or robo-claw, but then you are matching the environment, and guarantee tool compatibility against all extant tasks!
We already have specialized robots on earth... paper slicer, lawn mower, bazooka, whatever. They're all machines that are specialized for the task at hand, we're not making a humanoid robot that gets down on all fours and individually plucks blades of glass.
The car factories already have specialized robots... they're not mimicking a human hand holding a can of spray paint, shaking it up, and painting the car that way... it's a 6-axis arm, or a whole "grab the car and flip it while spraying paint" system.
It's not about inventing purpose-specific robots, it's about handling that long-tail of "stuff with tools that a human is designed to be able to use." Go over there, push that button. Go move that box from table1 to table2. Etc.
For well defined tasks in the factory domain, make a "real robot". For ad-hoc tasks in the interim... strap an LLM to a camera, battery, robo-legs and arms, cross your fingers, and hope for the best?
the human frame is just an experimental proxy for functionality, which turned out to be promising
two arms alone is the purpose-built robot you're referencing
They would be. When everything what could be done would be done by a robot. 24/7. Even without the lights on the floor.
You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.
"building what it can with anything it can get" is the definition of cheaper.
If it was easier or cheaper to create a multi-purpose robot to control vehicles and deliver bombs that's what we'd see Ukraine doing.
So the reason you see a lot of drone designs is because they're constantly innovating to try and build something effective: which is not cheap. Then whatever they come up with, it's preferable to use it right now if you can: because it's available and delay may mean you no longer have it.
Cheap is that last step: if it works you production optimize it and try to get the cost down so it's sustainable. But while that's happening you're generally also back to innovating because the enemy is deploying counter measures.
And all of this is happening across multiple dimensions at once: if you can get a great bulk price from Alibaba for some part via an intermediary but it doesn't turn up on time, or an alternative is delivering faster or the warehouse for some part got hit last week then get, there's now a new drone design with that variant.
Hell a lot of the output is just because the small machine shop knows how to build some particular design and has the parts, but another does not.
Its war: the cash price of things is not the only price nor even necessarily the most important one.
I've never been to a factory but I bet there's a lot of the same bullshit. Ditto in a mine.
On the other hand, I've been in a datacentre. I don't see much need for a humanoid form in there, everything is flat and predictable. Why don't we have robot DC techs? This is probably an interesting clue re the next 10 years of robotics and maybe the reason Boston Dynamics is only valued at $1.1B.
Seems we might still be pretty limited on usecases. Maybe a dexterity bottleneck.
What are you talking about?
Go outside, look around! The whole word was created by and for humans.