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Proof of Concept to Test Humanoid Robots

16 points

by 0xedb

5 days ago

| past

| 6 comments

| thehumanoid.ai

| HN

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Barathkanna

54 minutes ago

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What’s interesting here isn’t the humanoid form factor, it’s the systems integration. Plugging robots into Siemens’ industrial stack means they’re being treated like first-class nodes in existing logistics workflows, not special demos. If humanoids can reuse current automation software, safety models, and ops tooling, that lowers adoption friction a lot. The real question is whether reliability and MTBF get good enough to compete with simpler, non-humanoid automation at scale.

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bandrami

4 hours ago

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The human body is sub-optimally designed for most hard work humans do (which is why that work is "hard"). I laugh every time I see AI videos of a human-shaped robot harvesting crops: we have very, very effective crop-harvesting robots right now, and they are shaped like big boxes on wheels because that's a much better shape for doing that.

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XorNot

3 hours ago

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Universality matters though. It's less interesting that a hyper specific machine exists for a task than that the same machine might be able to do a wide range of tasks, provided the price point is right.

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obidee2

3 hours ago

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“Less interesting” is an interesting value to compare things that are typically measured by utility. Human form factor robots are definitely more interesting to us as humans, but really only economically viable for high mix low volume tasks (of which there are many).

But past a certain scale special purpose machines will always be more cost effective.

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bandrami

2 hours ago

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And more annoyingly they will no doubt be given modular behavioral capabilities that require separate subscriptions to use (even the big cube-shaped farming robots do this)

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dyauspitr

2 hours ago

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Those crop harvesting robots can’t do anything else though. They’re also not very good at weeding, or picking berries or tea. Things that require finesse. Also imagine not having to use the god awful amounts of pesticides we currently use. You’ve got to think of these humanoids as universal. You should be able to tell the robot picking weeds to stop and go do the grocery shopping ideally.

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bandrami

1 hour ago

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Why? One tool for one job. I let my gardener robot keep gardening while my grocery shopping robot goes to the store.

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fhub

5 hours ago

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The use case claimed here is (a) they can move around (b) they are "universal".

But

(a) Those things look like they need a wide berth to move around and flat terrain

(b) Those end effectors are far from universal. The payload weight seems so low that it even dropped an empty box at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIXjy2GWTg&t=150s

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bandrami

4 hours ago

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The bot may be notionally "universal" but will only operate on the DLC you buy from the robot rental company. Want it to wash dishes? That's the $20/mo dishwashing pack, or for one low price you can get the entire housework pack for only $80/mo.

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dyauspitr

2 hours ago

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It’s got to get good enough for open source versions at some point though.

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ben_w

38 minutes ago

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Eventually, but consider the power envelope for compute in an android is 10-100x lower than for a car*, while at the same time the range of tasks it has to be good at is a strict superset of driving a car, and that open source attempts at self driving cars are far behind the proprietary attempts, and that compute efficiency is only doubling every 2.5-3 years (Koomey’s Law), so expect something like 20 years before these are properly general purpose and also not remote controlled.

Still plenty of value from special purpose and from remote control, but that's the timeline for solving both at the same time.

* even with the compute being external, the global electricity supply is presently a few hundred watts/capita and already being used for all the other things we want electricity for, hence all current anger about data centers making electricity too expensive, but renewables could tilt this to 8 billion robots with 1kW compute each in as little as 10 years if we brush aside all the decarbonisation efforts and keep burning petrol in cars and gas in stoves etc., otherwise more like 15 years for that.

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bandrami

2 hours ago

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That would shock me. These things are going to have a TPM

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imtringued

1 hour ago

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The weirdest part about the box carrying humanoids is that this problem has already been solved by fork lift style robots [0] which are being sold by many companies. When people talk about universality, having a central warehouse with movable pickup & place locations is all you need. The only thing that would be interesting is to build a universal loader/unloader that can take parts out of the boxes and insert them into machines factorio style, but that loader doesn't need to be humanoid and could instead just be put on a movable cart.

[0] https://www.hairobotics.com/products/haipick-a3

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Animats

4 hours ago

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In this use case, the robot autonomously picked totes from a storage stack, transported them to a conveyor, and placed them at the designated pickup point for human operators.

Well, yes, you can use a humanoid robot for that, but there are far simpler robotic solutions. There are lots of systems for handling standardized totes.

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dyauspitr

2 hours ago

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Clearly that’s not the point. The end goal is essentially to build a robot that can function as a human slave would in the past.

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dfajgljsldkjag

5 hours ago

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I noticed they used the wheeled version for the test, so calling it a humanoid feels like a bit of a reach to me. The speed of sixty boxes an hour seems pretty slow if they want to replace actual people on the line.

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modeless

3 hours ago

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What constitutes a "humanoid" robot is a matter of some debate: https://james.darpinian.com/blog/the-humanoid-alignment-char...

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VladVladikoff

6 hours ago

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They look so hilariously slow and bad in the video, and it’s a really simple back and forth task, with empty crates.