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393 points lairv | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.24s | source
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HAL3000 ◴[] No.45528648[source]
All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.
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wongarsu ◴[] No.45529839[source]
The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1].

I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good

1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515

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aDyslecticCrow ◴[] No.45533035[source]
> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot

An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ...

... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

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93po ◴[] No.45533235[source]
I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.
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1. spopejoy ◴[] No.45543689[source]
We're so far from that though. Even if we magically jump over the failure rates we're discussing here, the safety considerations seem to be far worse. These things are heavy and dangerous, c.f. Rodney Brooks' "never follow a robot up stairs" https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-...