Trump administration to ban new Chinese humanoid robots

reuters.com

19 points·kaycebasques··7 comments

Almost all robots that do useful work are deployed behind barriers and kill switches. A robot that's strong enough to do useful work is strong enough to be dangerous. The humanoid form factor doesn't mitigate that fact at all.

Tesla robots are DOA

Humanoid robots are DOA outside of extreme niche use cases that are generally more dystopian than useful. This is a great case of people with a lot of money being informed by fiction rather than robotics.

Def not. There's so much soul-sucking labor that humanoids could efficiently do with an ROI of a few years.

If you need something to carry loads for example, you might want a large quadrupedal robot. That has the benefit of saving you a ton of money and engineering challenges, why pay for human-like dexterity when the job doesn't require it? By the same token you see the opposite all of the time with robot arms of varying description. When you need dexterity and precision, you probably don't need something that can walk upright, navigate stairs, and look you in the eye.

Not clear yet how the economics of standardization will work out.

Take a look at Unitree's robot line.[1] They have humanoids. They have quadrupeds. They have quadrupeds with legs that end in powered wheels. They have kung fu robots. There's much parts commonality between all these. It may be that there are various semi-specialized robots built from common components.

Video.[2] Makes Boston Dynamics look obsolete.

[1] https://www.unitree.com/

[2] https://oss-global-cdn.unitree.com/static/bad7100ff65f41c5ae...

... in attempt to give Tesla robots a fighting change.

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