←back to thread

217 points mfiguiere | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
Animats ◴[] No.41844346[source]
That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.

Nice piece of machinery, though. Boston Dynamics' humanoids were clunky electrohydraulic mechanisms borrowed from their horse-type robots. All-electric is now possible and much simpler. Schatft was the first to get this working, and they had to liquid-cool the motors. Don't know if Tesla has to liquid cool. They do that in the cars, so they certainly understand liquid-cooled electric motors.

I suspect that body balance and possibly walking were automated. It's hard to balance a teleoperated robot manually, and robotic biped balancing has been working for years now.

replies(7): >>41844354 #>>41844376 #>>41844377 #>>41844941 #>>41845078 #>>41845101 #>>41845921 #
matco11 ◴[] No.41845078[source]
I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?

In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc. So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.

The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.

Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.

The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .

replies(1): >>41845132 #
robomartin ◴[] No.41845132[source]
> these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones)

Actuation is still a massive problem in humanoid robotics. We have over 650 muscles. A humanoid today can't even approximate that. Sure, a robot might not need that many actuators to be extremely useful. However, to be general enough to be able to interact with any human environment, the number of required actuators will not be trivial.

Add to that gearing, couplings, driver electronics, encoders, thermal management, calibration, noise, maintenance and other per-actuator requirements and the picture quickly becomes overwhelming.

This is an area that is still looking for a significant breakthrough.

replies(2): >>41845227 #>>41845357 #
1. imtringued ◴[] No.41845227{3}[source]
We need better electroactive polymers.