Humanoid industrial robots are always a little confusing for me. The human form is not best suited for industrial tasks, and by making specialised robot arms, you could improve efficiency etc. It's only if you need to interact with systems that were designed for humans, and can't be modified to work with a more efficient robot that you need humanoids
Every single task that was easy and economical to offload to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor was already offloaded to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor.
What remains is: all those quirky little one-off processes that aren't very amenable to "robot arm" automation, aren't worth the process design effort to make them amenable to it, and are currently solved by human labor.
Thus, you design new solutions to target that open niche.
Humans aren't perfect at anything, but they are passable at everything. Universal worker robots attempt to replicate that.
"A drop-in replacement for simple human labor" is a very lucrative thing, assuming one could pull it off. And that favors humanoid hulls.
Not that it's the form that's the bottleneck for that, not really. The problem of universal robots is fundamentally an AI problem. Today, we could build a humanoid body that could mechanically perform over 90% of all industrial tasks performed by humans, but not the AI that would actually make it do it.
My impression is that a big part of the reason for the sudden boom in humanoid robots is that they lend themselves particularly well to RL based training using human-made training footage using VR. It’s much easier to have a robot broadly copy human actions if the robot looks like a human, instead of having to first translate the human action to your robot arm equivalent.
That is certainly a factor, but you also have to take into account that all these tasks in the factories are now centered around the human form because humans are doing them.
Yes that's pretty much it. Some people from boston dynamics were talking on a podcast. And they were saying that they sat down with toyota and figured out they could automate all the tasks in a factory, but it would take 10000 man years or something and toyota makes new trims every six months so you need about 10000 man years every six months or so.
It's the flexibility and adaptability with minimum training that's required.
Looking at the video at the bottom of the page, the robot looks like an old man, especially in the trash bag throwing sequence. Compare that to the recent Chinese kung-fu robots video...
Completely different situations. The Unitree demos are prerecorded movements with no real adaptability. While visually impressive, they are highly tuned to perform that specific sequence of actions. If you walked in front of one it would have zero awareness of you and you’d be hit. They’re essentially “blind”.
The last video here is likely demonstrating a teleoperated humanoid.
> The Unitree demos are prerecorded movements with no real adaptability.
That is not true. The routine is preprogrammed, but there is adaptability. If there wasn't they would fall on the ground in the first 5 seconds. The movement involved in the routine we saw requires continuous adjustment. You can't just record the movement as you would with a video game animation, real physics get in the way and you end up on your back on the ground trying to do a jump and a backflip.
The robots motion is not preprogramed at all, see how much more smooth the motion is?
Thats because boston dynamics are using an approach where they try to calculate and take the dynamics of motion into account, just like Unitree.
The kawasaki approach is clearly to use overwhelming torques in an effort to cancel all the dymanics and produce fully controlled movement. Exactly what an old man does as well or a robotic arm in a factory. It's honestly embarrassing it looks like kawasaki has no progress in the last 30 years their robots still move like its 1996.
Humanoid industrial robots are always a little confusing for me. The human form is not best suited for industrial tasks, and by making specialised robot arms, you could improve efficiency etc. It's only if you need to interact with systems that were designed for humans, and can't be modified to work with a more efficient robot that you need humanoids
Every single task that was easy and economical to offload to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor was already offloaded to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor.
What remains is: all those quirky little one-off processes that aren't very amenable to "robot arm" automation, aren't worth the process design effort to make them amenable to it, and are currently solved by human labor.
Thus, you design new solutions to target that open niche.
Humans aren't perfect at anything, but they are passable at everything. Universal worker robots attempt to replicate that.
"A drop-in replacement for simple human labor" is a very lucrative thing, assuming one could pull it off. And that favors humanoid hulls.
Not that it's the form that's the bottleneck for that, not really. The problem of universal robots is fundamentally an AI problem. Today, we could build a humanoid body that could mechanically perform over 90% of all industrial tasks performed by humans, but not the AI that would actually make it do it.
My impression is that a big part of the reason for the sudden boom in humanoid robots is that they lend themselves particularly well to RL based training using human-made training footage using VR. It’s much easier to have a robot broadly copy human actions if the robot looks like a human, instead of having to first translate the human action to your robot arm equivalent.
That is certainly a factor, but you also have to take into account that all these tasks in the factories are now centered around the human form because humans are doing them.
Yes that's pretty much it. Some people from boston dynamics were talking on a podcast. And they were saying that they sat down with toyota and figured out they could automate all the tasks in a factory, but it would take 10000 man years or something and toyota makes new trims every six months so you need about 10000 man years every six months or so.
It's the flexibility and adaptability with minimum training that's required.
Looking at the video at the bottom of the page, the robot looks like an old man, especially in the trash bag throwing sequence. Compare that to the recent Chinese kung-fu robots video...
Completely different situations. The Unitree demos are prerecorded movements with no real adaptability. While visually impressive, they are highly tuned to perform that specific sequence of actions. If you walked in front of one it would have zero awareness of you and you’d be hit. They’re essentially “blind”. The last video here is likely demonstrating a teleoperated humanoid.
> The Unitree demos are prerecorded movements with no real adaptability.
That is not true. The routine is preprogrammed, but there is adaptability. If there wasn't they would fall on the ground in the first 5 seconds. The movement involved in the routine we saw requires continuous adjustment. You can't just record the movement as you would with a video game animation, real physics get in the way and you end up on your back on the ground trying to do a jump and a backflip.
If you think I am wrong, sure I could be but have a look at atlas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe1dke3Cf7I
The robots motion is not preprogramed at all, see how much more smooth the motion is?
Thats because boston dynamics are using an approach where they try to calculate and take the dynamics of motion into account, just like Unitree.
The kawasaki approach is clearly to use overwhelming torques in an effort to cancel all the dymanics and produce fully controlled movement. Exactly what an old man does as well or a robotic arm in a factory. It's honestly embarrassing it looks like kawasaki has no progress in the last 30 years their robots still move like its 1996.
Have a look here https://underactuated.csail.mit.edu/intro.html for a more indepth explanation of the difference between the two approaches.