It's still user controlled like a surgical robot but for construction. I'm guessing it's eventually going to be run remotely by a bunch of japanese operators too old to work in the field. Also disappointingly small for "enormous", was hoping for a gundam.
It reaches 12m on a telescoped crane, the actual scale of the robot body looks pretty small, smaller than the cab of the truck. Pretty human scale all things considered, makes one wonder if it's goign to be mounted on treads or legs one day for indoor use. It does look very cool indeed.
Not much different than everyday on sites everywhere with boom cranes. Which are arguably much more dangerous due to being less dexterous and no video. Notably 1:23 where it's similar to working with a crane.
That looks incredibly cool, and also instantly nausea inducing - I can’t imagine the video feed and the head gyros are fast enough to avoid that little bit of lag and judder that turn VR into a vomit machine.
I wonder if it wouldn't be easier / more comfortable for the worker to just get a low-poly reconstructed 3D rendering of the environment. That way at least they could move their head as much as they want and still get a read-time feed in their goggle without the usual VR tricks.
Responses so far say to optimize neck latency or use a joystick but why not use a 360 camera and handle it in reprojection. First pass could literally be a gopro or insta360 streaming to the headset and you could eventually integrate cameras and do the stitching yourself. The tech already exists and works, and it removes moving parts and actuators
Why not?
There's no need for the neck to have more than 1~5 ms of lag, and about 5~10 ms photon lag even with a framebuffer involved (if you align the rolling shutter of the camera to the row-by-row multiplexed display, say OLED @ 240Hz, you should manage 4~5 ms).
I like how the robot head motion is linked to the operator's head motion, such that the robot is able to nod its head near 2:15. I also like the feedback control near 0:35.
Patlabor is criminally underrated, in particular Patlabor II by Oshii. Often neglected given how popular his other stuff like GitS is but probably one of the best animated films when it comes to post WWII Japan's military/political questions.
It seems that in many cases, Japanese robot designers prefer humanoid form over a more practical design. Watching the video linked by ano-ther, it seems that many of the demonstrated tasks could benefit from cameras that are placed more closely to the tool. Accurately placing parts, inspections, and the tree limb removal tasks are examples of this.
Ya it's not a human, you're not limited to binocular vision and can have multiple sets of cameras pretty easily of you wanted. Who knows what the designers are thinking.
Huh. Robot with denim jacket in Chromium, but placeholder image (mountain and sun icon) in Firefox. Can view in Firefox if cb query param is removed. Weird.
Lol
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Interestingly, humans come very close to it during operation.
The feedback on the arm is very cool, though.
Not with headtracking though. Not sure that's reasonably possible.
This doesn’t apply to everyone, so it’s just a matter of training people with more tolerance.
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https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240702_14/