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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

I understand the argument but its honestly ridiculous in my eyes. How about a set of arms that can reach into dishwasher and stack dishes and a washer/dryer to fold laundry... Except even without solving the bipedal movement, that doesn't exist at a consumer price point.

Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?

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It doesn't need to be at a consumer price point first, it needs to replace a human at an existing warehouse or manufacturing role first, and that's achievable in the next two years at this point.

When you have arms that can reach into the dishwasher, you're also going to want them to put away your dishes. And so suddenly they need to get up high. And you're not going to have a SECOND set of arms at your washer/dryer to fold laundry, you're just going to buy a second DLC for your existing robot. And it needs to get between those places, so if you have stairs, wheels don't cut it. You need a bipedal robot very quickly.

Why not buy a second set of arms instead of legs or just a set a wheels?

I feel like if I write two paragraphs, nobody reads the second one...

Maybe they're asking what your argument against buying a second set of arms is, rather than suggesting it as a solution?

Totally, and they ask why not wheels...

I think the key is that none of our actual home use cases can be done with just arms. You don't need your folded clothes sitting in front of your washer and dryer, and a set of arms can't handle folding sheets.

Why not? I would love to have a set of arms that could flip the laundry from the washer to the dryer and then take it out of the dryer and fold it and put it in the basket.

I understand that particular use case sounds cool! I really do.

And then you want them to put away your dishes, and they can't, even though it's just a software update, because they're across the house. And they're BIG, so you don't have room to store two anyway.

And they were $20,000, so...

Back around the turn of the (20th) century, electric motors were expensive. It was not uncommon to buy one motor that could do multiple things, like this vacuum/grinder/buffer/blower/pulley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_8FWJuSho

If we start making robot arms at scale, they're going to get cheap.

I'm also not sure people are really going to want bipedal robots walking around their home, blocking the hallways, recording you in your underwear, etc.

Sure, an electric motor is like 10cm on a side. A set of robot arms that can fold laundry are like a 100cm cube. Most people aren't going to have space for two of them.

And the arms need cameras too...

A washer+dryer is pretty huge already. Seems like it could get some robot arms without changing the form factor dramatically.

That said, I think this is way farther off than anyone thinks. I want to know what the maintenance schedule looks like for robot arms. Looks like a lot of small moving parts. Probably a lot of plastic gears.

In an industrial setting, sure, maintenance is just an expense. But wheels require less maintenance and factories can be designed around the robots.

Plastic gears? I sure hope not!

As I said, maybe earlier in this thread, I've now seen a laundry folding robot work, but I think loading a dishwasher and then putting away dishes is going to come first.

Use wheels and buy two if you have to...the Roomba solution. Besides, why do you need to solve stairs the hardest way possible, a fully bipedal robot, before it moves past vapor?

Stair climbing systems that work using wheels exist. Google stair climbing wheelchairs for a few examples.

I am familiar, I'm a big fan of Dean Kamen's work. So far, we haven't seen a single wheeled stair climbing vacuum cleaner, even though the original iBOT is 23 years old.

That solves the horizontal mobility problem. And then you have cabinets - and wheels don't solve the vertical mobility problem. So then you need a scissor lift on those wheels, or a hydraulic lift.

The robotics nerds always end up back at bipedal because it's vastly simpler once you're already solving arms.

A scissor lift or some other thing seems a lot simpler than trying to allow for a bipedal robot to knee to reach things close to the ground. Or if legs are the best option, why not a quadruped? Much more stability with a lot of the same advantages.

I'm curious - have you done any robotics work?

Ok, so your idea is to sell a machine without software and then hand wave the software part away by saying it will be released at a later date? Sounds like a scam to me. You'll just end up with another AMD situation where the company is only interested in selling the hardware and has zero interest in developing the software, because it costs money and can only ever generate revenue by selling more hardware, which will make the hardware focused company feel vindicated in deciding to not put effort into the software.

My idea? No. I'm pointing out that if you release something capable of loading a dishwasher and putting away dishes, it could be as little as a future software improvement to make it do something else.

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