I don’t understand. What is the point of these humanoid robots? Why are they suddenly all the rage? It just seems so inefficient compared to industrial robots and machines we already have.
The appeal is that it’s a single robot that can do many different tasks based on the need, and directly work in spaced designed for humans. It’s the universality of it that’s the real benefit. With industrial robots, you have to design a robot for each specific task, and then it can only do that one task. This makes sense for factories that build a specific type of thing, and it’s more efficient in that context. However, if you want a tool that can do many different tasks, then a humanoid design makes a lot of sense.
And now that the cost of these robots is becoming very cheap, I think UniTree sells them for something like 18k now, it’s cheaper to just grab one of these general purpose robots and get it to do what you want than to design one from scratch.
Is there data on the power draw and maintenance aspect? Looking at these I feel like this is something that’s gonna need fixing all the time (due to all the moving parts) and having more than a small amount will be highly inefficient in terms of space and power. I imagine they are able to recharge themselves though so you don’t have to worry about that.
I haven’t really looked at whether anybody published lifecycle maintenance costs or not. I guess as these types of robots are put to use, we’ll learn more about cost effectiveness.
I guess it’s because humanoid robots can work in the for-humans facilities we already have while other types of robots would necessitate the facilities to be heavily modified or redone to be able to work in them. Also, if the robots fail they can get humans to fill in instead of having to stop production until the problem is fixed.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering this as well. It makes so little sense but I’m guessing it just makes for shiny propaganda. I was never convinced by the argument that “Humanoid robots are better suited to working in environments that were built for humans”, like, WE are the ones who make these environments, wouldn’t it just make more sense to rebuild the facility to be more efficient for cheaper and more sensible machinery, rather than invest exponentially more to replace all the humans with robots?
It’s like saying “Cars were designed with humans in mind, so if we want self driving cars we need to put a humanoid robot driver in the drivers seat”.
wouldn’t it just make more sense to rebuild the facility to be more efficient for cheaper and more sensible machinery
Yes, but that takes time and we need to have a good and mature enough tecnology for it to make at least some “financial” sense. So, if the humanoid robots can do work that humans can do then it means that we could try make/have AIs make new robots and new enviroments that work well toghether without consideration for human form.
Basically, from the first factory robots half a century ago until a few years back there wasn’t that much of an advance that could allow robots to work alone in anything but a few cases. Now though the technology that allows for humanoid robots is the technology that allows non humanoid robots to work a lot better in basically all cases, so we will finally begin seeing more and more robots and infrastructure being built to take advantage of the new advances, at the same time we’ll also get humanoid robots for other tasks, like some of the ones that involve working closelly with people…
I was never convinced by the argument that “Humanoid robots are better suited to working in environments that were built for humans”, like, WE are the ones who make these environments
And they aren’t built for free so they were built to work, and now that the technology is allowing some of that to change it will gradually change.
I don’t understand. What is the point of these humanoid robots? Why are they suddenly all the rage? It just seems so inefficient compared to industrial robots and machines we already have.
The appeal is that it’s a single robot that can do many different tasks based on the need, and directly work in spaced designed for humans. It’s the universality of it that’s the real benefit. With industrial robots, you have to design a robot for each specific task, and then it can only do that one task. This makes sense for factories that build a specific type of thing, and it’s more efficient in that context. However, if you want a tool that can do many different tasks, then a humanoid design makes a lot of sense.
And now that the cost of these robots is becoming very cheap, I think UniTree sells them for something like 18k now, it’s cheaper to just grab one of these general purpose robots and get it to do what you want than to design one from scratch.
Is there data on the power draw and maintenance aspect? Looking at these I feel like this is something that’s gonna need fixing all the time (due to all the moving parts) and having more than a small amount will be highly inefficient in terms of space and power. I imagine they are able to recharge themselves though so you don’t have to worry about that.
I haven’t really looked at whether anybody published lifecycle maintenance costs or not. I guess as these types of robots are put to use, we’ll learn more about cost effectiveness.
I guess it’s because humanoid robots can work in the for-humans facilities we already have while other types of robots would necessitate the facilities to be heavily modified or redone to be able to work in them. Also, if the robots fail they can get humans to fill in instead of having to stop production until the problem is fixed.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering this as well. It makes so little sense but I’m guessing it just makes for shiny propaganda. I was never convinced by the argument that “Humanoid robots are better suited to working in environments that were built for humans”, like, WE are the ones who make these environments, wouldn’t it just make more sense to rebuild the facility to be more efficient for cheaper and more sensible machinery, rather than invest exponentially more to replace all the humans with robots?
It’s like saying “Cars were designed with humans in mind, so if we want self driving cars we need to put a humanoid robot driver in the drivers seat”.
Yes, but that takes time and we need to have a good and mature enough tecnology for it to make at least some “financial” sense. So, if the humanoid robots can do work that humans can do then it means that we could try make/have AIs make new robots and new enviroments that work well toghether without consideration for human form.
Basically, from the first factory robots half a century ago until a few years back there wasn’t that much of an advance that could allow robots to work alone in anything but a few cases. Now though the technology that allows for humanoid robots is the technology that allows non humanoid robots to work a lot better in basically all cases, so we will finally begin seeing more and more robots and infrastructure being built to take advantage of the new advances, at the same time we’ll also get humanoid robots for other tasks, like some of the ones that involve working closelly with people…
And they aren’t built for free so they were built to work, and now that the technology is allowing some of that to change it will gradually change.