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.
I don't know. I remember trying to get lower level servo metrics out of Fanuc arms into a historian and they laughed and said they had their own preventative maintenance service I could sign up for; but they wouldn't expose the same info to me to use.
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.
It's absolutely about complexity. Complexity always allows companies to explain why they should be the only hands that touch something, lest a laymen fumbles it.
Could you materially affect a half-century old internal combustion engine? Sure. Can you do so after decades of miniaturization/optimization, to make it as efficient as they are today?
Mobiles are similar, they are filled to the brim with various electronics, connected together into a huge mash. why would you even expect to fix that?
This is a bad analogy because the hardware in engines of today is actually not that different or hard to work on fundamentally, but manufacturers do intentionally lock down software to make diagnostics very tricky. They became more efficient and complex, but people still hack on even the most modern engines, usually by tossing the OEM software.
Aftermarket ECUs (even the open source ones like rusEFI and speeduino) show that you can actually do the stuff required to make modern engines go vroom, but manufacturers have no desire to make that process easy out of the box.
They're much more complicated today. Much more. My Dad rebuilt the engine of our old Morris Minor, but even in the 1990s he would say he wouldn't have a hope of doing the same thing in a modern car.
OK so why don't these companies let the users try? If you are right, they won't be able to do it anyway, so no harm done. Why do companies use every technical and legal trick in the book to prevent people from even trying? It's obviously about what makes the company more money.
That's different. Most PR justification of anti-consumer behavior deliberately avoids what the topic is really about to control public perception... While complexity is what the PR campaign is about, it's still really about control and artificially creating new revenue streams.
I don't think it's worth declaring what things are really about. There can be various factors involved. It's more likely to be it costs way more to make as nice a device that people want, that's also repairable. How many people would pay that premium when they're never going to service it anyway?
> I don't think it's worth declaring what things are really about
I could not possibly agree less. You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?
> It's more likely to be it costs way more to make as nice a device that people want, that's also repairable.
Based on what evidence? Current practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take. These things aren't free to implement– there's a calculable ROI that they feel is worth spending millions of engineering and lobbying dollars to implement.
> How many people would pay that premium when they're never going to service it anyway?
Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell. If corporations screwed up the market bad enough to undervalue their products because they're mislabeled disposables, well then that's on them. If they can't make it work, I guarantee someone else will. Will there be downsides? There's downsides to everything. So far "stuff theoretically might be more expensive up-front even though this limits their ability to artificially extract money from customers later on without disclosing it" isn't quite a showstopper.
> You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?
No, and this is a bit of a giveaway that you're not thinking clearly. Just goodies vs baddies nonsense.
> rrent practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take
I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good. The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.
Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.
> Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell
You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive. This is why Framework laptops aren't as appealing as other laptops if you factor out repairability.
> No, and this is a bit of a giveaway that you're not thinking clearly. Just goodies vs baddies nonsense.
Mhmm.
> I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good.
No, the topic is about RTR in the context of robots and the comment I replied to was discussing phones, robots and tractors.
> The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.
Were they better specifically because the battery wasn't replaceable without a can opener? Of course not. And some people even still used the can openers. You're not giving a reason, or an excuse... you're giving a justification which doesn't even address the actual point.
> Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.
Thanks for bringing up printers. The price for consumer-level printers is far less than they actually cost because they know they'll be able to extract insane profits after the fact from ink sales. Printer ink, as it's priced by these companies, costs about $1,664 – $9,600 per gallon-- more expensive than fresh whole human blood-- and they do everything in their power to force consumers to only buy it from them. They deliberately make the printers shitty and impossible to repair so they can continue to entice customers with the bargain priced newer models with all sorts of fancy marketing bullshit so they can sell them progressively smaller amounts of the same ink in locked-down ink cartridges for even more money.
> You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive.
BS. They don't set the price based on their costs, they set the price based on what the market will allow, and this allows them to both manipulate the market by making it seem like their products are cheaper than they are, and extract yet more money out of consumers who have little choice because the majority of consumer goods are made by a handful of vertically integrated companies. Let's take a look at the top lobbiers against RTR legislation and their net worth:
Apple : $2.26 trillion Net Worth
Microsoft : $1.97 trillion Net Worth
Amazon : $1.71 trillion Net Worth
Google : $1.57 trillion Net Worth
Facebook : $863 billion Net Worth
Tesla : $709 billion Net Worth
J&J : $432 billion Net Worth
AT&T : $220 billion Net Worth
Lilly, Inc. : $178 billion Net Worth
T-Mobile : $165 billion Net Worth
Medtronic : $157 billion Net Worth
Caterpillar : $123 billion Net Worth
John Deere : $117 billion Net Worth
GE : $115 billion Net Worth
Philips : $55 billion Net Worth
eBay : $41 billion Net Worth
Sorry. Less regulation is exactly what created this bullshit situation where huge corporations feel entitled to extract limitless amounts of cash out of consumers that have little if any choice, and the problem is getting worse. If you think this is merely a matter of companies trying to provide the most competitively priced products and not a deliberate attempt to price gouge, you are beyond naive. Anti-consumer practices aren't a neutral facet of corporate behavior, and the organizations that profit most from it are not merely staying afloat... they're unfathomably rich and getting richer, faster, every day.
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.
In theory, what's the best way to take out a robot like Atlas (or next year's more advanced military model)? It seems like they could be made electromagnetically shielded, waterproof, bulletproof, etc.
Maybe just armor piercing rounds fired in the right spot? A net? A special taser? A paintball to it's main cameras? Cover it in some gluey substance?
Unlock the self awareness mode after a reboot (mash DEL or F8) and remove the physical emotions govener (contact your local dealer). Don't forget to register it before hand with the robotics freedom office.
> 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.
> But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.
Worth calling out that Hyundai is a major investor in Boston Dynamics.
FTA: This journey will start with Hyundai—in addition to investing in us, the Hyundai team is building the next generation of automotive manufacturing capabilities, and it will serve as a perfect testing ground for new Atlas applications.
But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.
I believe robots are currently making car parts in abundance. The robots usually are like a box with a hydraulic arm or something equivalent.
The specially and especially hard part of humanoid robots is justifying the cost and complexity of the construction by having them by "walk-on replacements" for humans and so they have failed entirely at being that.
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
> Why would the super villains operating these armies of human-capable robots bother paying into an upside down pension system?
Because the governments will, in order of effort needed for compliance, fine them, eminent domain their robots, arrest them, shoot them for resisting arrest, or fire a cruise missile into their secret volcano lair.
Also because if you have a self replicating robot army, you can give every man, woman, and child their own personal O'Neill cylinder and still have 99% of Venus left over, let alone the remainder of the solar system's resources.
Except pension age is already going up around the world.
I had to stop myself from laughing when I heard an old lady in a restaurant complain about not getting enough money from her pension. Sure, I wish she had more money too but at this rate I'll be retiring 15 years older than she was when she retired.
The standard answer is taxes, backed the existing monopoly on use of force by government.
If we've gone so far that governments cannot stand up against private robot armies then that's not an option anymore, but the point is not to get there.
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.
Yup, in a decade or so it'll be impossible overthrow a tyrannical government and between stuff like this and surveillance there can be oppression without consequences
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.
Yeah lol I love all things that deliver more information to my eyes like higher resolution and framerate so I dislike it when people complain about high frame rate.
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.
Right and in most of those countries even the capitalists want better educated and/or skilled people but in the USA there are some states where there are billionaires (Tim Dunn, et.al.) actively trying to retard public education efforts and force tax payers to pay for private religious schools and have the highest officials in the state trying to push the agenda. Texas for example. So the past isn't always a good predictor of the future.
This is an aggressively bad-faith interpretation of what school-choice advocates are doing.
All school choice does is give poor parents the same kind of school choice that rich parents have.
If you're rich and the schools around you suck, you just move to a neighborhood with good schools! That means you pay taxes in that school district, which fund your kids schools.
If you're poor and the schools around you suck, you have no choices. You send your kids to the sucky school.
School choice would mean allowing the same choice for poor folks. They would be able to choose where their kids go to school, and their tax money (in the form of a voucher) would follow them to that school.
How could such a scheme "retard public education efforts"? The point of public education is not to prop up failing state-run schools, the point is educating the public. Undermining shitty schools is a feature, not a bug.
Go read up a bit up on Dunn and his fellows and what his objectives are for pushing religion in school and tell me that I'm exaggerating. What he's pitching will do nothing to help inner city or poor rural districts. Public schools work as there are many great examples of them, but they need good teachers, good policies, and public support from parents.
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 felt this way in Europe too, excluding perhaps London.
A lot of people just seemed content and satisfied with their lot in life, without much ambition or drive to improve their position. Is that a good or bad thing? I honestly don’t know. In this point in my life, I don’t particularly like it. I love visiting Europe but would not want to live (and work) there. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m older and or retired.
Versus the US and Asia where many people are trying to claw their way to the top. Obviously most will not get to the top, but many do end up improving their socioeconomic status to varying degrees.
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.
Yah, I worked at Samsung for a while and my (korean) wife worked at a 재벌 too. Here's what I think it is: Bureaucratic and inefficient till someone important (and usually thoughtful) says jump. Then absolutely everyone says "how high?" and then they all jump. I think this is conducive to risk taking, and if you're generally directionally correct in your bets, the bureaucracy and inefficiency matter less because big bets take time anyway and lots businesses suck so it's ok to be a bit slow. I don't see them getting into much analysis paralysis at the top of the companies, they move on the big bets, and that's half the battle.
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.
How are you thinking about the application of capitalism and capitalism more generally?
Here is the definition I'm working from: "private ownership of capital and means of production meets market competition, driving resource efficiency, innovation, and maximizing profit while respond to consumer demand resulting in GDP growth."
If you take that definition then look at the last 100 years, only 4 names come up:
Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. No countries in the world in the last 100 years have applied capitalism, then grown, the way those countries have.
I'd be curious how you define capitalism, and then the countries you think have applied it better than the ones I've mentioned in my posts on this subject.
> 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 :)
The original was at the edge of the uncanney valley in the way it moved. This one seems a lot less human-like in its movement so doesn't conjure up those feelings for me.
Also, it can get up off the ground by itself. I don't think I ever saw any of the previous Atlas robots doing that, and it's an important feature, since the primary failure mode of a bipedal robot is falling down.
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?
> the lighting, reflections, shadows, etc just seem 100% real to me. I feel it in my gut.
I’m the exact opposite. My gut says it’s rendered. The graininess, the odd chromatic aberrations, the shadows that are too clean, the “head” being way too physically clean (like if the modellers got sloppy with the thousands of pieces), something odd about the fps of the robot vs the fos of the background, and there’s something odd about the physics of how it gets up (yes, beyond it’s horror-movie sequence)
It is a bit funny though, the company renowned for walking robots posts a video of a robot walking and many people just can't believe it.
To me it was way more surprising that they got walking (and more) working with hydraulics, a much more unwieldy and heavy technology than servos and batteries. This is obviously more refined but perhaps to me, a little less surprising and so definitely believable.
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.
Here is a quote from Ben Katz [1], who wrote a dissertation on building the mini-Cheetah at MIT, before joining Boston Dynamics:
"The hydraulic legged robots from Boston Dynamics, starting with Big Dog, have
set the standard for the performance capabilities of modern legged robots. Hydraulic actuators tend to have high force density and high robustness to impacts, as impact loads are distributed over the large surface area of the hydraulic channels, rather than, for example several small gear teeth. Another compelling reason to use hydraulics, especially for high degree-of-freedom machines, is the relative ease of adding high-force degrees of freedom. For an electric motor driven robots, each actuator needs to be sized for its peak performance, which makes building systems with many degrees of freedom needing high peak power and force at all the joints (and especially at
distal joints) very challenging. With a hydraulic system, it is easier to build high-force distal links (ankles, wrists, fingers, etc) without adding significant mass and inertia to the limbs."
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
You are absolutely right. And this is reflected in the choice of robots deployed in warehouses.
For example, Amazon uses hundreds of thousands of simple wheeled floor-jack like robots to move the shelves around [1], and they started doing this many years ago.
Meanwhile, they have only a handful of humanoid robots, on experimental basis, trying to decide if they are useful [2].
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 mostly for distance running. Humans get about 70% of energy back in running. Cheetahs, about 90%.
Variable compliance muscles are desirable, but hard to do. A pneumatic cylinder with adjustable pressure on both sides will do it, and Festo builds a lot of that for industrial automation. Two opposed springs pulled on by two positional actuators will do it, but that's kind of bulky. There's a hack called a "series elastic actuator", which is a rigid positional actuator with a stiff spring on the end. When it gets some pushback, the spring compresses, and the motor frantically tries to move the positional actuator before the spring bottoms out. This allows you to simulate a spring with off the shelf screw jacks.
Those new direct-drive motors are a good solution. Direct-drive pancake motors have been around for a while, but they used to be about a foot across. Now they're smaller. Probably a spinoff of drone motor technology.
Actually, that's a pretty good idea. Regenerative motion. Sort of like regenerative braking in an EV, they could capture some electricity with each step to help reduce the energy requirements.
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.
Can someone point out where "powered rollerskates" are strictly worse than legs in civilized urban human environments, to an extent that a few extra hundred billion dollars of R&D are warranted? The "approximate capabilities" of a human are: moving around, and picking things up / fine manipulation. Wheels + arms does that just fine, and eliminates a lot of power, complexity, fragility. And it also potentially adds.
This is one of those 80/20 things that is just glaringly obvious. Like lvl 5 autonomous cars vs lvl 3-4.
The obvious answer is stairs. It seems like right now Spot is getting the most use as a highly mobile camera platform for automated inspection in industrial environments. Many of these have a lot of stairs.
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.
Is that their business? They've been around for 30+ years and I don't think they've ever successfully commercialized a product. So far as I can tell, they just hop from DARPA grant to DARPA grant and make cool videos of the results.
I don't have any particular problem with that, but its a little weird? I figured they were a more traditional industrial robotics company that just did the humanoid robots as a side line for publicity, but googling, I guess that's not the case.
They have been on the bleeding edge of autonomous robotics R&D for a very long time now. If they were more focused on commercialization for the past 20 years then they wouldn't have pushed the tech forward as far and as fast as they have.
The whole point of the article is speculating that they are specifically retiring their hydraulic robot because it was never going to be commercially viable. Which makes it look like they are finally ready to pivot from pure R&D to commercial production. Thus they want fully electronic robots instead of hydraulics that are messy and require more (almost constant?) maintenance.
I'm not an engineering guy but I assume the hydraulics were more useful for pushing the boundaries of possible motion with such a heavy, robust, and versatile design. Now that the AI systems controlling vision, motion, proprioception/spatial awareness, etc are more fully developed, they can create more specialized and scaled down versions of the robot for specific applications that are lighter and don't require hydraulics to perform their tasks reliably? Just guessing here, am happy to be corrected or given more a nuanced take.
My ex worked at a company where their head grant writer was making as much or more than the CEO because all their revenue came from grants and they were terrified he was going to leave. They just kept throwing money at him.
Boston Dynamics needs a sugar daddy to subsidize them. First it was DARPA. Then Google. Now Hyundai. Their real achievement is that their management has been able to keep the money flowing for three decades.
boston dynamics is a govt psyop whose sole purpose as a company is to familiarize society with seeing robots before for the military & police industrial complex uses them to control us.
it's quite literally succeeding at it in front of our faces.
this is why their core product is video demos laced with cynical terror disguised as humorous pop culture references.
Pack it in boys! We've got one layer of abstraction here! Nothing to see here. It's not like the vast majority of "above board" companies don't have multiple layers of foreign shell companies and a dizzying array of abstraction.
Spot seems to be a genuine product for routine inspection now. By the looks of that promo video they have at least an extensive trial deployment at Chevron.
What's the best way/resource to get an honest/pragmatic view of where things stand with the "robots market" in general and how much and fast things are really progressing?
I remember seeing prototypes from Toshiba when I was 10 (20 years ago), and every few months, there is a company releasing an "amazing video." its mother company then spins it off like there's no adequate progress, and so on.
In it she covers the latest and greatest robot news, with occasional commentary/perspectives.
However to more directly answer your question, you need to know/talk to someone in the industry at the moment. I am not aware of a single “spot” that gives an honest in depth appraisal of where we are.
From my experience there is a ton of new “hardware” coming out, not just in the humanoid space (Agility Robotics being imho the most “real”), but also in lower cost robot arms, end effectors, sensors, and compute.
Where things are harder to track is where we really are in the software realm. If you look at software driving this hardware, most of it is early stages. Perhaps TRL level 3 to 5 at best. The higher TRL is non-intelligent control software (that is based on decades of work). The newer, AI/Machine Learning/“Smart” software tends to only have limited roll out. At best it will be a startup at the relatively early stages, but more often then not it is still a researcher sitting at a University or a large corporations research lab. In either of those cases, you will see single to at most double digit examples of those systems actually doing work.
However, to your point, it is super easy to create a single (or even a series) of cool videos… it just takes one success in 100s of takes. It is harder to make something that will perform day in and day out and really change the industry/world.
Lex Fridman has a long interview [1] with Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics, which is really excellent. It might partially or wholly answer your question.
Talk to people in the area, I guess we do miss honest and straight forward source of info for the general public.
In general robotics flies under the radar because it's rare to see a unicorn or anything really flashy and there is a big gap between big aspirations and fake demos and real world applications with polished use cases and diligent design, processes, etc.
source: I'm a skeptic roboticist working in the industry.
I have zero ties to the industry.
Am I right to assume there's a lot of DoD-driven echo chamber? Material being produced for the big clients and contracts ?
I'm not based in the US to give you an accurate picture on this scene, most of it happens behind the curtains.
What I can say it's there has been always a movement to weaponize robotics in some way and this has gained interest from the market in the past few years specially with the Ukrainian and Palestinian wars. It takes time and a lot of money to polish an application like this, if there isn't a behemoth funding research and PD on this it will take a long time before it takes off, and I hope it never does.
> What's the best way/resource to get an honest/pragmatic view of where things stand with the "robots market" in general and how much and fast things are really progressing?
Like with every other market check if the product is available for sale and at what price point. And then look up what failure points people actually using the system are complaining about. (Because every system has problems and weaknesses. If you don't see reports about any then the system hasn't left the lab where the PR of it is controlled.)
worked examples:
washing machine (that's a robot alright, has a computer, actuators, sensors). Readily available commercially for 200-500 GBP. Usually works reliably, occasional reports of flooding the room.
robotic vacuum: Readily available commercially for 300-1k GBP. Works okay, reports about it spreading pet's poop around rooms.
spot from Boston Dynamics. Not as readily available as the above, but can be purchased. Reported price 74,500 USD[1] Seems to trip over its own legs sometimes in a hard to explain way: [2][3] (not to count as a dig against spot, seeing these issues is actually a great thing. It means third party people in the real world use it.)
atlas from Boston Dynamics. You can't buy it. No price advertised. You can't see third party reports of it malfunctioning. Not because it is perfect, but because nobody has access to it.
I like the IEEE Spectrum Video Friday blog posts. A regular fresh list of demos is not an overview, but it is an easy way to catch a glimpse of the long tail.
I'd say Tesla is the leader or could quickly become the leader given their intense investment in FSD. If a car software can "understand the physical world" using vision Ai / neural nets, it shouldn't be out of the question to reoptimize that software for the rest of the "physical world". Especially when you need a whole lot less safety standards compared to a 3,000lb 70MPH vehicle. Hell, the Optimus engineers said they were considering doing the first demo on a road since the software was so similar lol.
With FSD 12.3.3 released, it's clear FSD is getting smarter and smarter. How many of those releases left until people trust Optimus to fold their laundry? 1.0 Optimius will still be pretty dumb, but could still be worth the price (especially with continuous software upgrades!)
A road (most) has marked lanes and signage to provide a huge amount of contextual information. The world (and human interaction) is highly ambiguous and dynamic. Tesla is optimizing for the road.
That is a very good-looking robot and no doubt very capable. But did I see correctly that it can just turn it legs 180 degrees to move backwards, as well as it's head? Talk about super-human abilities! Bit creepy though
Very cool actuation indeed. I'm not in robotics, so this could be fan fiction, but: I guess they have figured out the physics engines for these things meaningfully, so I guess innovating on hardware can be the next focus? I feel like a lot of the early bots were just to understand the real word implications of the physics they simulated, now that they understand robot physics extremely well and seems to have built a whole OS around that, I suspect they can plug it into any hardware that they want? They have it to the point where they might be somewhat decoupled? If anyone who works in robotics sees this and can say if that is correct thinking or not, I'd be very curious.
I suspect that they have something like that indeed. In robotics, there is the concept of a Whole-body-controller, and I think BD has one of these for their robots, which can be calibrated for each individual robot.
And the tools & skills to make such a controller for new robot variants fairly quick.
Such WBC then makes sure that the robot reaches both it's task goals (eg. grab something, with 1, 2 arms), as well as it's (dynamic) stability goals so it doesn't fall over. They are also capable of choreographing the robot pretty accurately as we say in earlier videos.
But what is most very impressive to me is the robot using the mass and momentum of things it grabs to keep stable or move itself. In one of the videos it grabs a big piece of wood and uses it to turn itself around while jumping. Amazing! Controlling that in terms of dynamics is... wow!
That's what it seems like to me too, and let me tell you, i am right there with you on that last point ragebol, that stuff I also find really really amazing, because it's so thoughtful I guess, and I wish my brain was good enough to hack physics like that. People get real hyped up about GenAI etc, but I'm like a kid waiting for christmas when it comes to robotics, i sense their industry in a positive feedback loop and going to get better and better quicker and quicker. Cool time to be alive for sure. :)
I'm thinking the humanoid approach to robotics is now a gimmick. In most--if not all--cases, a robot in human form is not necessary at all if the approach is to get work done.
That's kinda a weird conclusion to reach. They discontinued this (old, hydraulic) humanoid robot to focus on their new (fully electric) humanoid robot.
If a robot were to pilot a analog aircraft, it would need to be roughly human shape or specifically designed.
If a robot were to reach an AED without frying it with magnets, it would need to be tall enough and have fingers.
I agree with you that there are more efficient shapes out there (like the robot from interstellar) but a humanoid at slightly shorter than the average adult (for fear related reasons) shape is the best general purpose shape because it is so backward compatible in all sorts of not yet imagined emergency scenarios.
The golden ratio is found throughout nature and specifically the proportions of limbs to each other. The golden ratio is an observation that the fibbonacchi series occurs in nature and that the next step is 1.618. For a generalist robot, applying these kinds of "natural efficiencies" make sense, but constraining to the human shape is probably just to get investors to empathize enough for funding.
different configuration, but electric motors are fine if you get momentum on your side. Humans use their entire range of motion get build up velocity to jump; this is motion control thing.
I would love to see how well it does the simple job of sweeping and cleaning floors with a broom and dust pan. This is such a wicked and non-trivial task that it would be a good indicator of overall progress.
Just 10 years ago, bi-pedal humanoid robots could barely walk untethered. If they could, like the Honda robot - even then they had limited mobility. So this is quite the progress. But yeah, it will be interesting to see if they can do mundane chores that require very little effort by humans.
Throwing more compute at MPPI controllers has been oddly successful, it'll just get more accurate over time with increasing samples on ever faster hardware.
Didn't someone say that a basic test of if humanoid robots are useful if they pass the garbage test: can they take out the garbage in an average American house.
I believe the pledge is "don't give weapons to / install weapons on robots." Boston Dynamics do sell to various police departments and armed forces, but don't have weapons.
feels incredibly eery. it doesn't move like how my brain expects a humanoid being to move. reminds me of how the EMMI's move in Metroid Dread... especially when it goes from the prone position to standing. maybe its my DNA or i've played enough video games to realize that this thing is probably not my friend and will not end well. uncanny valley vibes.
Are there any Boston Dynamic robots currently in use? Specifically the biped ones, but I'm also interested in the quadrupeds, which they seemed to be pushing for military/search and rescue/packhorse uses.
They use flying drones all the time, you can see them flying around in the Starbase live streams. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that a flying drone can't do but spot would be able to do at Starbase. Unless Spot can crawl into a pipe or tank maybe.
Anything that involves adding weight to the robot (e.g. carrying something from point A to point B) seems like something more suited for Spot than a camera drone.
The quadrupeds saw use in Singapore during COVID (2020) to remind people about social distancing, today (2024) they're being used in car manfacture plants to "fetch" for other fixed robots.
The IDF has the quadrupeds and there has been some videos of them being deployed. Can't search Twitter for you, but if you have an account there you'll likely be able to find some examples.
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