Comment by cpgxiii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpgxiii | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

"Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts.

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".

> "Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts. > Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.

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).

Vertical integration is superior if you can pull it off. Big fucking "if". There's a reason why automakers don't usually do it.

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.

> 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.

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".

How long ago was your robotics experience?

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…

Also, a general purpose robot vs a custom purpose robot represent very different capital investment profile for the factories?

automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.

Amazon warehouses still have a huge number of ununionized workers doing manual labor

Pretty different tasks, environments, outcomes, metrics, goals, and other things in a warehouse vs. a factory… really have no clue how this is supposed to be relevant. Why not mention farms or libraries?

Well, Farms have the UFW...

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.

Yeah, my point is that they're all unrelated choices.

> ununionized

Wouldn’t that just be “ionized”?

Hyundai’s manufacturing facilities in the U.S. are not unionized.

But in Korea?

What do American labor union practices have to do with Korean domestic manufacturing?

It’s not really a secret that most new auto factories serving the US tend to open in places where those unions are not active, like the South or Mexico

I have visited factories for work and my experience is the same. There is so much stuff that could easily be automated but is not because it is too expansive for too little value to make a custom one off machine. The big high volume things will be automated but these machines will have 90% success rate and lot's of stuff that needs to be done by hand. You can search for factory tours on youtube to get an idea. Here are two videos, an Amazon warehouse and a Tesla factory. the big heavy stuff is automated but lot's of work is still done by hand. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-R6cBkza17k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45slYC99uUg

The Amazon video is from four years ago, and the Tesla one from 1.5 years ago.

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.

Do you think humanoids would be a fit on assemblying the assembly line itself? To my limited knowledge a lot of setting up the factory is making sure your line works as expected with X 9s reliability. Here dexterous humanoids are this _universal_ virtual-to-physical interface and, akin to Auto Research, could run assembly line experiments autonomosuly?

> How long ago was your robotics experience?

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.

“One of the largest automakers in the world” makes me think of very low-tech companies like Ford or whatever. I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.

What an unnecessary comment dismissing the expertise of an actual expert - what’s your robotic experience to dismiss him so contemptuously?

I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.

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?

> I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.

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?

>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company

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.

> companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots

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.

You have to have the will to be a vertical company how many companies want too in the west? Not many do.. BYD, DJI, Huawei, maybe Apple a little there are few others but most are partial but the Chinese are the leaders in a willingness to do it all, note Ford Motor at one time did it all for a short time at their beginning.

The west may have to change in the future.

Ford doesn't even make the top 5 - and however "low-tech" you think these companies are is the point, the overwhelming majority of new cars are being built by those "low-tech" automakers. The problem is not the limits of current technology (or even of the state of the art 10 years ago), it is the lack of vision and will within these companies to invest in using it.

> 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.

This gives me vibes of "... but they're dinosaurs" that pervades Tesla-type discussions. I've watched several extensive discussions here with some Tesla fans breathlessly announce "really cool", "futuristic" "new thinking" functionality or features for their cars that "the dinosaurs just aren't even considering"... except to their initial skepticism, disbelief, actually, the dinosaurs often do have those things (examples including "adaptive blind spot", where triggering of those alerts is highly dependent on speed differentials, so if the vehicle is more rapidly approaching you, the alert fires earlier, dynamic traffic sign recognition - my car doesn't just recognize school zones, but can see when they are active if they have flashing lights, and, based on equipment installation, will actually count down to when my intersection light will turn green, or road mapping radar, where it actually scans the road surface ahead, avoiding potholes when safe, and adjusting ride height dynamically, not just 'press a button or choose a mode to raise or lower').

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.

My point isn't that they're dinosaurs, it's that they don't really develop robots. Some automakers do, rarely, but they mostly buy them from specialized robotics companies. It's not knowledge-gathering to buy a sander, nor even really to use one. Not on the same way it is to develop that sander. If they were all making their own robots and competing in that way, maybe my response would be different.

> probably the vast majority

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."

I remember around 2018 Tesla was actually criticised for excessive automation because it purportedly was slower and more expensive than manual work.

Your work experience does not represent the current state of the art in car manufacturing automation

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