As we enter an era of wide scale robotic deployment, we need to think long and hard about what the maintenance bottleneck will look like. We need to advocate now for reliable and open upgrades, replacement parts, service documentation, and diagnostics.
Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.
Literally standing in front of a proprietary Fanuc industrial 6-axis arm waiting for Roboguide at the moment... this is already a wide scale industry and shows low probability to trend towards open and repairable technology.
There have been some efforts for vendor-agnostic robot software like RoboDK and other warehouse execution systems, but the default is proprietary vendor software.
It would be nice for society if this were true, but we'd need someone to exist whose complementary technology was robotics who found it worth commoditizing the entire ecosystem against their will. Or regulators who weren't entirely beholden to industry lobbyists.
Fanuc robots are straight forward to service, they make the parts very available to do it yourself if you want. We order them here and there no problem.
But they are beasts and it can take an entire day just to replace a part. Then you have to reassemble it in the right order. None of it is made difficult on purpose. It has tight tolerances, and fancy shit like harmonic drives for zero backlash and more.
Currently in the process of trying to make a VR interface for roboguide. It's very challenging to hack around what they give you. I wish it was simpler to extend the software, but it requires an additional fee just to have the capability to make an extension. I'll admit FANUC can be pretty greedy when it comes to piling on the licenses just to do simple stuff.
> Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.
It's going to be kneecapped far worse than phones or tractors. A general purpose humanoid robot is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple gps farming tractor or a cheap android phone.
Companies will absolutely NOT want to give up that moat after developing such tech for 10-20 years.
I'm not sure it has ever been about complexity or cost.
Right now no regular user has the technical ability to fiddle with a phone's laminated screen glued to a touch matrix paired with a fingerprint sensor and a camera, so we're alreay past the complexity threshold.
But we could still reuse a screen block from phone A on phone B, except that's been forbidden by technical measures specially added to prevent it.
The same way we could probably replace a whole leg with another from a robot from the same series, except it will be DRMed to death.
We'll have to eternally push for regulation I think, companies will always try their best to fuck with repairability.
The second someone releases a general purpose humanoid robot that is capable of self replication but is locked out from doing so with DRM the race will be on to break that DRM.
The self replicating humanoid robot will be a supreme game changer. It's a genie in the bottle that lets you wish for more wishes.
> Under the law, companies that make cellphones and other consumer electronics are required to provide the tools and know-how to repair those devices.
1. Do you think the Oregon law fell short by not requiring industrial electronics to be repairable as well?
2. Will the proliferation of tools and know-how for repair be sufficient to meaningfully extend the life of most electronics?
3. Is legal mandate sufficient or necessary to motivate companies to open their chests to the public? Or is a voluntary movement possible that still rewards the stakeholders?
My hope is that projects like Atlas will be sustainable and prices eventually come down to commodity levels - say the price scale of cars. If people are empowered with tools to develop on these machines in a safe way, I think we could see a revolution similar to the cell phone or PC. My fear is that these machines will become just an extra inefficient automation step in an overpriced supply chain one-off application.
Uh, what evidence do you have of this "wide scale robotic deployment"? More humanoid robots have been announced lately but that is all I know of.
Humanoid robots have many, many challenges to deployment. Especially, creating a machine that people can safely operate near is extremely challenging. The amount of intelligence person uses to not bump another person is very under rated.
It's a hypothetical deployment but it's reasonable to expect. These robots will be very valuable, and everyone will want one. It's not going to become a housemaid in a few years. But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. Moravec's paradox is still in play, but advancement in AI chips will slowly overcome it.
Never mind right to repair, of all the advancements, maintaining the new machines has always been the obvious new job that gets created. We created the loom and fired everybody? Well now there's a loom engineer job waiting for (some) of you. What happens to society when, instead of having a robot-fixing job, the robots can fix themselves? AGI is a distraction; much like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong test. It's not the problem of how can I fix the one robot I've taken out a second mortgage to buy that I'm worried about, it's when can I buy two robots and they can fix each other that I'm worried about. Because then there is no new job being created.
Seeing "no more jobs" in the "worry" list is surprising. State pensions exist, and the only reason the pension ages are rising is not enough workers to pay for them; having so many robot workers that there is no demand for human labour* would lower the "pension" age down to zero, AKA "UBI".
* which definitely requires human level general AI at fairly low electrical power demand
Respect this opinion, but concerned that it's a limiting one.
In my opinion, repair and maintenance is the most commonly overlooked aspect of an automated system deployment. Scaling is impossible without efficient tools to fix problems when they occur, especially if the number of authorized service people is limited.
The more serviceability can be automated and standardized, the greater the number of areas that will benefit from widespread robotics.
That first video of the bot standing from the floor and turning towards the camera one joint at a time does something strange to the uncanny valley horror movie part of my brain.
Pretty sure it's meant to show "these robots can perform movements that are impossible for a human"
But the animal part of our brain that screams danger when we see this is just a byproduct of that. Anybody giving it real credence rather than just laughing it off should stop driving a car, travelling by air, talking to people on a phone, etc.
It seems like a bad decision from the business side of things too. Having your employees freaked out about the new robots seems like a nonzero ding towards a company purchasing one.
It looks like CGI to me, the way to camera moves together with the depth of field and that things appear too shiny. They don't state anything about it so I don't know what to believe.
An incredible testament to Boston Dynamics Engineering that commentators think it’s CGI. I’m sure it’s real because BD never releases CGI and this looked real to me.
Funny how the ubiquity of AI generated artwork plus the shitty quality of phone videos has made people to think that "high quality + depth of field = fake".
However if you look closely the robot does have scuffs and scratches on it so I think it's real.
Figure, a new startup, is working on a similar humanoid robot. They just raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft [1]. Not sure about their chances of succeeding.
On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful.
A while ago I made a blog post collecting 20+ efforts for humanoid robots specifically. There has been a real explosion in humanoid announcements in the past few months and it's hard to keep up even if you follow the news.
imho, Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?). I've been privileged enough to build in those countries for an extended period of time, and work with builders in many other countries. I strongly believe nobody bruit forces ideas into existence better than them, they make the resources happen in the right way. Even if you're not much into capitalism, how deeply it's been embraced by the culture still fascinating, especially as a Canadian where I believe we do capitalism particularly poorly.
South Korean society and government are deeply co-opted by an oligopoly of wealthy families. While that leads to a great environment for safe investment, I'll gladly give it up for a more egalitarian society.
You doubtlessly know more about life in South Korea than I do, but i found this video [0] and its sequel [1] very enlightening.
I agree, the skill inherent apparently in the US culture of using capital to scale things up compared to the rest of the west feels unappreciated. You give a US capitalist money, labour pool, and a goal, they will organize them to a system to deliver miracles. This is not obviously how things go! It is an underappreciated virtue.
I wonder if there is research on the topic - I mean Adam Smith is translated to all languages so it’s not about the ideas or non-tacit knowledge. Must be something institutional or otherwise cultural.
I live in Canada and have found many Canadians lacking drive, curiosity and will. Also far from being straight in business to the point they feel like politicians. In average dealing with USians was much more to my liking (I am originally from the USSR). There are of course exceptions on either side.
I don't completely disagree, but Korean and Japanese corporations are renowned for being bureaucratic and inefficient, at least at the white collar level. Having worked for a Korean conglomerate, I've written off ever working for one again because of this kind of stuff. (disclaimer - I am Korean)
Then again, it's hard to deny the progress and products these countries have made. So what gives? To be honest, I don't know.
South Korea is a bit different in some interesting ways. The South Korean economy is dominated by a small number of "chaebols", which are massive corporate conglomerates that tend to be owned and controlled by an oligarchic family. Samsung, for instance, is owned by the Lee family. These families also tend to have a ton of political influence. The government has, for decades, embraced an explicit policy of developing the chaebols via industrial policy. So, as you can imagine, you end up with a situation where the chaebols and their owners have lots of political power. Not exactly the kind of free market capitalism that someone like Milton Friedman would endorse, but it seems to be effective in its own way.
There's a flip side to South Korea's chaebol-centric economy, however. South Korea's national security situation is extremely dangerous, so in fact one of the reasons for the industrial policy has been to maintain a domestic defense industrial base so that they aren't dependent on arms imports from Western countries. Accordingly, most of the South Korean chaebols have a significant presence in the arms industry. In recent years, this sector has expanded, with South Korea becoming one of the world's leading arms exporters.
Japan, the country whose GDP hasn't grown in 30 years, has 0 major tech companies, still uses fax machines for everything, and has numerous stagnant, conglomerates/trusts/monopolies, does capitalism really well? I feel like this comment comes from another planet.
> Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?)
China is not far behind, despite an authoritarian govt.
KR & JP, as well as CH, clearly learned well from Americans.
I found it creepy at first, then I saw a comment saying it looks like the lamp from the Pixar intro and now I can’t take it seriously. Beautiful movement, though. I hope one day they’ll be simple and powerful enough to replace people in high-risk jobs, where you could even just control one remotely and perform tasks that way.
I actually find it less creepy than the original atlas for some reason ha. It looks like there is a chance this one will be able to unpack the dishwasher, until it decides it doesn't want that job anymore :)
This doesn't look like a rendered video to me at all. I'm not enough of an expert to point to specific reasons, but the lighting, reflections, shadows, etc just seem 100% real to me. I feel it in my gut.
You apparently disagree? Was there something in the video you think marks it out as CGI? Or do we just have differing gut instincts about it?
thats just not in the BDs ethos. They have been the only company really trying to physically build these kinds of robust, dynamic systems for the last 3 decades (almost to a fault).
The success of old Atlas was partly due to the compactness and high power of hydraulic actuators. There’s a lot of actuators to pack into a humanoid robot and it takes a lot of power to do backflips.
I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.
Their press release actually says electric atlas is more powerful. Though I wonder if that's higher peak torque, and not so much explosive power required for jumps. A commercial robot doesn't need to do parkour.
see what i find puzzling is that warehouses have flat floors right? so what benefit does the upfront cost of building something with a bunch of extra actuators for all the joints in 2 legs, and the ongoing running costs of far less mechanically efficient bipedal locomotion have over wheeled movement like their other robot, the Handle, offers? i should mention i know nothing about robots so i'm sure there must be a good reason for it, but this thought has been on my mind ever since I saw george hotz bring it up in the Comma Body reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhvt0ZmqmGQ
as a layperson, i feel like biomimicry only makes sense for hands and arms, at least for the vast majority of commercial use cases
I still can't search the word "hydroaccumunoid" on Google, that appeared once in one of their promo reels, and still am wondering if the word was literal corporate secret.
Does anyone else think the joints seem stiffer than the hydraulic version? The head and torso are receiving a lot of shock forces with each step. That seems like a downgrade from the previous one.
It clearly has a much larger range of motion and if it is also stronger as claimed then I can't wait for the acrobatics videos that are surely coming.
But I think the most exciting thing is that it has hands from the start. Atlas didn't have hands for most of its existence and so couldn't do much in the way of useful tasks. I think controlling hands is actually much harder than walking or doing backflips. Hopefully Boston Dynamics will be able to make this version useful.
Electric motors dont have a lot of "give", like hydraulics do. But yes force-torque controllers can be tuned to be squishier. Someday I think electric motors will be the muscles and we'll have some kind of elastic tendons. For energy efficiency, it seems obvious to harness impact energy in a mechanical spring system, as nature does.
Or just use wheels / a wheel. This whole humanoid thing strikes me as an addiction to old sci Fi stories.
Hydraulic systems have very little "give", unless you put a hydraulic accumulator (an air tank with a fluid/air barrier) in the system. Electric motors have plenty of "give". Forcing a motor to turn backwards won't hurt it. The gear train is usually the weak point. As motors and controllers have improved, robot gear reduction ratios have decreased, which reduces the load on the gear train and lets the motor absorb shock loads. Direct drive robots eliminate the gear train entirely. Here's a nice one.[1] "You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - General Electric electric locomotive rep, around 1900.
With modern motors, you can get huge torque with light weight, and cooling becomes the limitation. Schaft used water-cooled motors in their direct-drive robot. Google bought Schaft, ran them into the ground and killed them.
It's not because of science fiction stories, it's because things designed for human to use, is designed for a humanoid form factor. If you want to accomplish a task, it's going to be reflected by that machine. Eg a conveyor belt doesn't look like a human. But if you want swap a robot where a human used to be, it's far easier if that robot is humanoid and has the same approximate capabilities. Thus, we have humanoid robots.
Wheels are useless in this world. If you’ve ever tried using a pushchair or a wheelchair on much of the planet, built environment or no, you’ll find wheels are useless.
Hydraulics shouldn't have any give, as the working fluid is considered "incompressible". Of course in the real world the tubing can expand slightly and there are friction losses, but the reason they went with hydraulics in the first place is they can set a position and not have to use more energy to hold it there (since the cylinders are pressurized).
If the gear ratio on these motors is high, then there can only be faked compliance in the tuned force-torque controllers you mentioned. MIT's little cheetah robot, on the other hand, deliberately used low-gear ratios to keep things naturally squishy if needed. This is the way to go; putting elastic tendons or spring elements seems like a good idea but then you can't actually model the non-linearity well (the 1st order motor becomes a 2nd or higher order system).
I'd assume this is just a software problem. As long as we are talking about the stiffness of the joints and not the limbs I see no reason to not be able so simulate it.
Readit News
Farewell to HD Atlas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EM5_VFlt8
Boston Dynamics retires its legendary humanoid robot https://spectrum.ieee.org/boston-dynamics-atlas-retires
All New Atlas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.
There have been some efforts for vendor-agnostic robot software like RoboDK and other warehouse execution systems, but the default is proprietary vendor software.
It would be nice for society if this were true, but we'd need someone to exist whose complementary technology was robotics who found it worth commoditizing the entire ecosystem against their will. Or regulators who weren't entirely beholden to industry lobbyists.
Fanuc robots are straight forward to service, they make the parts very available to do it yourself if you want. We order them here and there no problem.
But they are beasts and it can take an entire day just to replace a part. Then you have to reassemble it in the right order. None of it is made difficult on purpose. It has tight tolerances, and fancy shit like harmonic drives for zero backlash and more.
It's going to be kneecapped far worse than phones or tractors. A general purpose humanoid robot is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple gps farming tractor or a cheap android phone.
Companies will absolutely NOT want to give up that moat after developing such tech for 10-20 years.
Right now no regular user has the technical ability to fiddle with a phone's laminated screen glued to a touch matrix paired with a fingerprint sensor and a camera, so we're alreay past the complexity threshold.
But we could still reuse a screen block from phone A on phone B, except that's been forbidden by technical measures specially added to prevent it.
The same way we could probably replace a whole leg with another from a robot from the same series, except it will be DRMed to death.
We'll have to eternally push for regulation I think, companies will always try their best to fuck with repairability.
Deleted Comment
That's the wrong way to say "recouping the cost of a large up-front R&D investment".
The second someone releases a general purpose humanoid robot that is capable of self replication but is locked out from doing so with DRM the race will be on to break that DRM.
The self replicating humanoid robot will be a supreme game changer. It's a genie in the bottle that lets you wish for more wishes.
https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Downloads/Publ...
> Under the law, companies that make cellphones and other consumer electronics are required to provide the tools and know-how to repair those devices.
1. Do you think the Oregon law fell short by not requiring industrial electronics to be repairable as well? 2. Will the proliferation of tools and know-how for repair be sufficient to meaningfully extend the life of most electronics? 3. Is legal mandate sufficient or necessary to motivate companies to open their chests to the public? Or is a voluntary movement possible that still rewards the stakeholders?
My hope is that projects like Atlas will be sustainable and prices eventually come down to commodity levels - say the price scale of cars. If people are empowered with tools to develop on these machines in a safe way, I think we could see a revolution similar to the cell phone or PC. My fear is that these machines will become just an extra inefficient automation step in an overpriced supply chain one-off application.
Humanoid robots have many, many challenges to deployment. Especially, creating a machine that people can safely operate near is extremely challenging. The amount of intelligence person uses to not bump another person is very under rated.
* which definitely requires human level general AI at fairly low electrical power demand
In my opinion, repair and maintenance is the most commonly overlooked aspect of an automated system deployment. Scaling is impossible without efficient tools to fix problems when they occur, especially if the number of authorized service people is limited.
The more serviceability can be automated and standardized, the greater the number of areas that will benefit from widespread robotics.
But I would have thought they’d rather not have us experience atlas as some kind of freakish terminator mixed with the girl from the ring.
But the animal part of our brain that screams danger when we see this is just a byproduct of that. Anybody giving it real credence rather than just laughing it off should stop driving a car, travelling by air, talking to people on a phone, etc.
Dead Comment
It looks amazing in the video.. But of course Boston Dynamics chose the most disturbing way of demonstrating its movement capabilities, as usual.
I swear they do it on purpose at this point. Good lord! Put some googly eyes on these things at least.
https://budget-cuts.fandom.com/wiki/Supervisor
https://www.avforums.com/reviews/lost-in-space-season-1-tv-s...
However if you look closely the robot does have scuffs and scratches on it so I think it's real.
On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful.
1- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...
This "robots + AI" space is heating up just as fast as LLMs, and every country seems to have a dozen startups in the ring.
Here is just a sample:
https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo
https://rainbow-robotics.com/en_main?_l=en
https://sanctuary.ai/
https://www.tesla.com/AI
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CToL2qkCd8g (funny)
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1b10p2i/chines...
https://www.engadget.com/menteebot-is-a-human-sized-ai-robot...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/15jyw... (NSFW)
...
Everyone is working on this.
https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-...
Edit: Haha, case in point. I opened Twitter and sure enough there's a new announcement of a humanoid robot today, from Intel/Mobileye: https://twitter.com/AmnonShashua/status/1780611499133685889
You doubtlessly know more about life in South Korea than I do, but i found this video [0] and its sequel [1] very enlightening.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74&t=1050s 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A&t=589s
I wonder if there is research on the topic - I mean Adam Smith is translated to all languages so it’s not about the ideas or non-tacit knowledge. Must be something institutional or otherwise cultural.
Then again, it's hard to deny the progress and products these countries have made. So what gives? To be honest, I don't know.
There's a flip side to South Korea's chaebol-centric economy, however. South Korea's national security situation is extremely dangerous, so in fact one of the reasons for the industrial policy has been to maintain a domestic defense industrial base so that they aren't dependent on arms imports from Western countries. Accordingly, most of the South Korean chaebols have a significant presence in the arms industry. In recent years, this sector has expanded, with South Korea becoming one of the world's leading arms exporters.
China is not far behind, despite an authoritarian govt.
KR & JP, as well as CH, clearly learned well from Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge
1: http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09ekK2QgflM
Maybe we need life-size robot battles? Would love to see son-of-Atlas suplexing TeslaBot like that mini white one does!
You apparently disagree? Was there something in the video you think marks it out as CGI? Or do we just have differing gut instincts about it?
This is going to haunt my dreams.
I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/atlas-humanoid-robot-ceo-interview
It clearly has a much larger range of motion and if it is also stronger as claimed then I can't wait for the acrobatics videos that are surely coming.
But I think the most exciting thing is that it has hands from the start. Atlas didn't have hands for most of its existence and so couldn't do much in the way of useful tasks. I think controlling hands is actually much harder than walking or doing backflips. Hopefully Boston Dynamics will be able to make this version useful.
Or just use wheels / a wheel. This whole humanoid thing strikes me as an addiction to old sci Fi stories.
Hydraulic systems have very little "give", unless you put a hydraulic accumulator (an air tank with a fluid/air barrier) in the system. Electric motors have plenty of "give". Forcing a motor to turn backwards won't hurt it. The gear train is usually the weak point. As motors and controllers have improved, robot gear reduction ratios have decreased, which reduces the load on the gear train and lets the motor absorb shock loads. Direct drive robots eliminate the gear train entirely. Here's a nice one.[1] "You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - General Electric electric locomotive rep, around 1900.
With modern motors, you can get huge torque with light weight, and cooling becomes the limitation. Schaft used water-cooled motors in their direct-drive robot. Google bought Schaft, ran them into the ground and killed them.
[1] https://shop.directdrive.com/products/diablo-world-s-first-d...
If the gear ratio on these motors is high, then there can only be faked compliance in the tuned force-torque controllers you mentioned. MIT's little cheetah robot, on the other hand, deliberately used low-gear ratios to keep things naturally squishy if needed. This is the way to go; putting elastic tendons or spring elements seems like a good idea but then you can't actually model the non-linearity well (the 1st order motor becomes a 2nd or higher order system).