Time for robot taxes:
What is the point in a humanoid form factor robot that you can’t have sex with?
Walker S1 humanoid robot starts factory work at BYD
Submitted 13 hours ago by Suoko@feddit.it to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.metameha.com/tech/robots/walker-s1-humanoid-robot-byd-factory/
Comments
captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 6 hours ago
MBech@feddit.dk 5 hours ago
What’s the point of any machine you can’t have sex with?
iN8sWoRLd@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The fact that nearly every scene in that video is a 2 second edit suggests that if these are really being used in a factory they are doing none of the things shown in the video IRL.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Can it empty my dishwasher?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
From what I’ve seen on other “advanced” humanoid robots, it probably could, using 4-10 times as much time as you would yourself, and breaking a few pieces in the process.
benignintervention@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I cannot tell if this is legitimate or some potemkin-esque concept design for a factory
Humanius@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Given that it’s a humanoid robot, I suspect that this is more of a marketing stunt than any practical deployment of robots.
Humanoid robots don’t make a ton of sense in manufacturing. Why mimic the sub-optimal anatomy of a human when you can make your robotic work slave have any appendage you want, which are designed to be optinal for their task along the assembly line?
Humanoid robots mostly only make sense in spaces that need to be designed for humans (like homes or hospitals) where the robot needs to regularly interact with human infrastructure.
theneverfox@pawb.social 5 hours ago
Because the automated tools are human scale
Even if you rework them all to be fully automatic, you still need a human scale robot to move the work pieces from station to station
Humanius@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
There is a difference between human-scale and humanoid.
Human-scale just means the robot needs to fit in a space designed for humans, while humanoid means it has a torso, possibly a head, two arms and two legs.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
I guess the idea is that humanoid robots ideally require no adjustment to the factory, they can just use the tools made for human workers.
Suoko@feddit.it 11 hours ago
Sure but if you have brand new machines that are supposed to be operated by humans, buying a 10k humanoid compared to paying some real humans is going to appeal a lot of entrepreneurs: and you’ll be able to mix the two kinds of workers initially, see Amazon warehouses as an example.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 9 hours ago
The training data for a lot of robots comes from tele operation so that form factor is going to stay important for some time. And making the whole plant basically wheelchair accessible isn’t worth it for now. There are variants with a wheeled base but once you add in some balancing for heavier objects and kneeling to pick stuff up it’s not much cheaper.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Not only is this inaccurate, it still doesn’t make sense when you’re talking about a bipedal manufacturing robot.
Like motion capture, all you need to capture from remote operation of the unit is the input articulation from the operator, which is then translated into acceptable operation movements on the unit with input from its local sensors. The majority of these things (if using pre-cap operating data) is just trained on iterative scenarios and retrained for major environmental changes. They don’t use tele-operation live because it’s inherently dangerous and takes a lot of the local sensor inputs offline for obvious reasons.
OC is saying what all Robotics Engineers have been saying about these bipedal “PR Bots” for years: the power and effort to simply make these things walk is incredibly inefficient, and makes no sense in a manufacturing setting where they will just be doing repetitive tasks over and over.
Wheels move faster than legs, single purpose mechanisms will be faster and less error-prone, and actuation takes less time to train.