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392 points lairv | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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causal ◴[] No.45528087[source]
If this is real it would be so easy to create a hype video that shows one of these things out in the wild handling unscripted situations with adversarial actors. But the fact we always see the same basic tasks in these videos makes me deeply suspicious that this is demoware. Bring in the Boston Robotics hockey stick guy for starters
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the_gipsy ◴[] No.45528448[source]
Yea, the selected short clips are extremely suspicious.
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ihumanable ◴[] No.45529083[source]
They've got an hour long video of it sorting packages if you want a longer clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U

They've shown the "putting dishes in the dishwasher" bit before, it seems to be getting better, but I imagine it still has a high failure rate.

I wonder if this company started off or has some founder that's really interested in the "handling deformable stuff" space. They really seem keen to promote that it can do tasks like folding a shirt or working with soft packages.

Definitely seems like a carefully curated video, but the longer videos make me think that either they are running a scam or they have some of this stuff working well enough.

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robots0only ◴[] No.45529653[source]
Here you can see another much simpler robot folding clothes for far longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeBIR0jVvU (there are more videos from other companies as well)

To answer your question -- folding clothes is easy, because clothes easily deform, do not break, fall smoothly when you drop them and most importantly are easily resettable task. Just through the well folded cloth up and voila start again.

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1. imtringued ◴[] No.45529887[source]
Actually, folding clothes is a challenging dexterity task. However, it's a trivial mechanical engineering task, which is why it is so popular with underpowered robot arms.
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2. robots0only ◴[] No.45532009[source]
How are you defining dextrous? I think it can be somewhat challenging but not dextrous -- the robot doesn't need to be very precise (few cms here and there do not matter), there are no forces involved, motions are all pick-place. Dextrous tasks would be things like shoe-lace tying, origami folding etc.