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392 points lairv | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.425s | source
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cooper_ganglia ◴[] No.45530893[source]
Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.

The frog boils quickly.

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paxys ◴[] No.45531624[source]
> None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago.

Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

I'm not saying one shouldn't be hopeful, but it's also not hard to see why people here are generally more conservative about the near future.

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cooper_ganglia ◴[] No.45531960[source]

  >Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.
Good point, which is why Boston Dynamics didn't really excite me. It was very cool to see the bot balance itself while being pushed with a hockey stick, but LiDAR-based pathfinding on hydraulic actuators has never truly felt like the future. Balancing and doing backflips is different than walking through a home and being able to perform delicate or visually difficult tasks like loading a dishwasher or caring for your baby in it's crib at night (just kidding, lol)

I'm sure a lot of BD's initial R&D has made Figure able to ramp so quickly and I don't mean to speak negatively of BD at all, but within 3 years, Figure has made it feel like the future is at our doorstep, meanwhile BD hasn't really done that for me in 3 decades. That's very impressive to me.

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1. derac ◴[] No.45531997[source]
Building on the shoulders of giants. Not long ago this smaller form factor battery powered electric robot wouldn't have been possible. The necessary tech for the software is only just starting to work. Post-2024 Atlas is also very impressive.
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2. buu700 ◴[] No.45532940[source]
Also worth noting that Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics in 2021, which I would expect to have been motivated by some sort of plan for productization and mass production.