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.
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
I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems.
Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently.
This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools.
Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well.
"Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks.
It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.
Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.
Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.
10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.
I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.
Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Those are things that get, and will continue to get, cheaper every day.
Yes, but the two (software and hardware) scale very differently.
Once software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so.
Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy.
Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150.
The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.
> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots.
It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.
The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).
Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:
Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing
Think about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.
Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.
There isn't enough migrant to do all labor east asia will need as its population gets quickly older. Plus the societal aspiration of culture dissemination isn't there.
This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.
have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!
Sure, but I have to launch the calculator, instead of just typing it into the ever present search bar of my persistent open browser.
If I could just type it into my shell, that would be nice. I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) to evaluate an equation, but then you get to play game with shell expansions and quotes.
In emacs I have to convolute the equation into prefix.
This was my solution as well. Why even have a robot? Give me a conveyor belt, some cameras and a moderately powerful SBC and I think I could probably manage a system that does one package a second with a fallback for humans to process what can't be processed by the machine.
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.
To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling.
It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper.
Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.
There are couple UR5 single arm cobots on eBay at $5.5k each right at this moment. The truth is that the value of humanoid is in it form, the novelty, the sense of accomplishment, not features.
because they already are. an industrial arm from ABB is frequently over $100k. add in the cost to fit it with specialty equipment like vacuum suction for handling boxes, made by a small to medium size business, they'd probably charge another $50k. and if it breaks you need specialty mechanics and parts.
in a world with 500 million humanoid robots, parts are plentiful, theyre easier to work on due to not weighing 5000 pounds, and like the other person said, economies of scale
the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy. it's like positing about the future of robotics by looking at a sumo bot.
what it IS , however, is a remarkable achievement of commoditization; getting a toy like that with those kind of motors would have been prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the world; but much like the Chinese 20k EV, it's not really a reliable marker for the actual future; in fact bottomed out pricing is more-so an indicator of the phase of industrialization that country is in.
Only because it's not yet attached to a reasonable AI, which is my point. It's not going to do any heavy lifting, but it could easily do basic house chores like cleaning up, folding laundry, etc if it were. The actuators and body platform are there, and economies of scale already at work.
I guess some folks just can't or won't put 2 and 2 together to predict the near future.
Your reasonable AI cannot resolve the fact that its arm can only lift 2KG.
I am impressed by Unitree, but the problem that needs to be solved here is not just better software. Better hardware needs to come down in cost and weight to make the generalized robot argument more convincing.
There is still a long way to go for a humanoid to be a reasonable product, and that's not just a software issue.
Economy of scale. This guy wanted a factory in China to do a custom run of a product where they didn't include the shell. It was cheaper to just buy 10,000 units and have a line to de-shell the items than it was to change the original line. That special purpose robot for the one task is going to get beat out by the general purpose robot thats being produced at 100x the volume.
An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking.
That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that?
It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan.
Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise.
So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task.
Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.)
The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...
That doesn’t even remotely follow. Human work is designed for humans so if you want human work done you need a human to do it.
If you want to replace the human the best bet is to redesign the work so that it can be done with machine assistance, which is what we’ve been doing since the industrial revolution.
There’s a reason the motor car (which is the successful mass market personal transportation machine) doesn’t look anything like the horse that it replaced.
You wrote what I wanted to write but I couldn't find such words.
Indeed, all the videos/examples are marketing pieces.
I would love to see a video like this "Logistics"[0] one, that shows this new iteration doing some household tasks. There is no way that it's not clunky and prone to all kinds of accidents and failures. Not that it's a bad thing - it would simply be nice to see.
Maybe they will do another video? Would love that.
This is always the case, though. The company is few years old. I'm no disciple of humanoids, but stuff has to start somewhere. Unfortunately hype > truth in order to get funding, so it produces incentives to cherry-pick like this.
How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
> How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
The video shows several of glitches. From the comments:
14:18 the Fall
28:40 the Fall 2
41:23 the Fall 3
Also many of the packages on the left are there throughout the video.
But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.
Three mistakes in an hour isn’t terrible, especially if that’s the last generation. As another commenter put it, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.
People keep parroting this line, but it's not a given, especially for such an ill-defined metric as "better". If I ask an LLM how its day was, there's no one right answer. (Users anthropomorphizing the LLM is a given these days, no matter how you may feel about that.)
I was confused by this because I assumed the robot fell over a few times - these are times that one of the piled up packages falls off or is a bit knocked off behind the robot (the second one seems to be knocked off by the elbow?).
> But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.
Would asking the robot for a seahorse emoji leave you in a puddle of blood?
Thinking about it, I am sure it is only a matter of time until a self driving car or a robot will be used to kill a human. Or on a lower level for a DDoS attack - all cars/robots going to the white house.
Is it really sorting? All I see is the humanoid robot moving similarly shaped / sized packages from one conveyor belt to a platform to another conveyor belt. A little industrial automation design would be much more effective, cheaper, and faster compared to the task it is performing.
The actual sorting is typically automated with scanners reading the labels and shunting packages from one conveyor belt onto another, basically a physical sorting network.
Tasks left for human "sorters" to do are:
- put packages on conveyor belt so the scanner can read the label (as done by the robot in the video)
- deal with damaged or unreadable packages that can't be processed automatically
- when a package gets jammed and forces the conveyor belt to stop, remove the offending package before restarting
- receive packages at the other end and load them into vehicles
Generally the difficulty with all of these is dealing with variability and humans act as variability absorbers so the machines can operate smoothly.
There’s a scene about 2/3 through the first video where they show a brief clip of the robot folding and stacking a shirt. The quality and speed was roughly comparable to a 7-10 year old - slow and somewhat sloppy, but recognizably a folded shirt.
Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable.
In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.
came here to see if anyone had read Rodney's recent essay - and to ask how does this announcement by Figure square with Rodney's essay.
The essay was long so I cant claim I read it in detail - one q in my mind is whether humanoids need to do dexterity the same way that humans do. yes they dont have skin and tiny receptors but maybe there is another way to develop dexterity?
Now the question is if this is GPT-2 and we’re a decade away from autonomous androids given some scaling and tweaks, or if autonomous androids is just an extremely hard problem.
For LLMs, the input is text, and the output is text. By the time of GPT-2, the internet contained enough training data to make training an interesting LLM feasible (as judged by its ability to output convincing text).
We are nowhere near the same for autonomous robots, and it's not even funny. To continue to use the internet as an analogy for LLMs, we are pre-DARPANET, pre-ASCII, pre-transistor. We don't even have the sensors that would make safe household humanoid robots possible. Any theater from robot companies about trying to train a neural net based on motion capture is laughably foolish. At the current rate of progress, we are more than decades away.
I would guess Amazon has a ridiculous amount of access to training data in its warehouses. Video, package sizes, weights, sorting.
I’m sure they could pretty easily spin up a site with 200 of these processing packages of most sizes (they have a limited number of standardized package sizes) nonstop. Remove ones that it gets right 99.99% of the time and keep training on the more difficult ones, the move to individual items.
A more efficient way might be to train them in simulation. If you simulate a warehouse environment and use that to pre-train a million robots in parallel at 100x real time learning would go much faster. Then you can fine tune on reality for details missed by the simulation environment.
Does your estimate account for advancements in virtual simulation models that has simultaneously been happening? From people I speak to in the space (which I am very much not in) - they had mentioned these advancements have dramatically improved the rate of training and learning - though they also advised we're some ways off from showtime.
As Tesla could tell you with their failure to deliver self-driving cars, it doesn't matter if you have exabytes of training data if it's all the wrong kind of data and if your hardware platform is insufficiently capable.
McD must be selling millions of burgers every day and cameras are cheap and omnipresent, so should not be difficult to get videos for single type of tasks.
There is no reason to employ humanoid robots in industrial environments when it will always be easier and cheaper to adapt the environment to a specialized non-humanoid robot than to adapt robots into humanoid shape. This is true for the same reason that no LLM is ever going to beat Stockfish at chess.
Time will tell if that's true. We don't have the same corpus of data, that's true, but what we do have is the ability to make a digital twin, where the robot practices in a virtual world, what would happen. It can do 10,000 jumping jacks every hour, parallelized across a whole GPU supercomputer, and that data can be fed in as training data.
No, it doesn't matter if you have a hypergenius superintelligence if it's locked in a body with no hardware support for useful proprioception. You will not go to space today.
A 'hypergenius superintelligence' could achieve most, if not all useful proprioception simply by looking at motor amperage draw, or if that's unavailable then total system amperage draw.
An arm moving against gravity has a higher draw, the arc itself creates characteristics, a motion or force against the arm or fingers generates a change in draw -- a superintellligence would need only an ammeter to master proprioception, because human researchers can do this in a lab and they're nowhere near the bar of 'hypergenius superintelligence'.
This is where I'm at. If you look at Boston Dynamics' first videos, they're 45 second clips of 4 legged robots walking in not even a straight line, just proving they could walk 5 feet over level ground without falling over. The top comment, from 4 years ago is "This was 11 years ago. Now these things are dancing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8
If you can make it look believable on camera for 15 seconds under controlled studio conditions... it's probable you can do it autonomously in 10-15 years. I don't think anyone is going to be casually buying these for their house by this time next year, but it certainly demonstrates what is realistically possible.
If they can provably make these things safe, it will have huge implications for in home care in advanced age, where instead of living in an assisted living home at $huge expense for 20+ years, you might be able to live on your own for most of that time.
The robot (BigDog) in that video shows numerous capabilities that Spot still can't do (climbing over terrain like that, being able to respond to a kick like that, the part on the ice, etc.). Even 16 years later.
This only highlights the fact that making a cool prototype do a few cool things on video is far, far easier than making a commercial product that can consistently do these things reliably. It often takes decades to move from the former to the latter. And Figure hasn't even shown us particularly impressive things from its prototypes yet.
It's an unfair comparison. Yes, they're both 4 legged 'dogs', but they use radically different design criteria -- design criteria that the BigDog was used to refine.
I'm not surprised that a Honda Civic can't navigate the Dakar Rally route..
I don't know if I caught your comment in my peripheral vision or what but GPT-2 is exactly where I conceptually placed this.
Neural networks for motion control is very clearly resulting in some incredible capability in a relatively short amount of time vs. the more traditional control hierarchies used in something like Boston Dynamics. Look at Unitree's G1
It's like an agile idiot, very physically capable but no purpose.
The next domain is going to be incorporating goals and intent and short/long term chains of causality into the model, and for that it seems we're presently missing quite a bit usable training data. That will clearly evolve over time, as will the fidelity of simulations that can be used to train the model and the learned experience of deployed robots.
Locomotion and manipulation are pretty different. The former we know how to do well -- this is what you see in unitree videos. Manipulation still not so much. This is not at all like GPT-2 because we still don't know what to scale (and even the data to scale is not there).
The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought.
You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins.
Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
>Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere.
They didn't go nowhere; they just didn't result in human-like AI. They gave us lots of breakthroughs, useful basic knowledge, and knowledge infrastructure that could be built off for related and unrelated projects. Plenty of shoot for the moon corporations didn't result in human-like AI either, but also probably did go nowhere, since they were focused on an all or nothing strategy. The ones that do succeed in a moonshot relied on those breakthroughs from decades-long research.
I'm not going to get into what Musk has been doing because I'm just not,
> Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.
Musk really missed an opportunity to promise wrecking the govt “next year” - we all would’ve rolled our eyes a la “fully autonomous driving next year” and been eating our hats by now
The current best neural networks only have around 60% success rates for small horizon tasks (think 10-20 seconds e.g. pick up apple). That is why there is so much cut-motions in this video. The future will be awesome but it will take time a lot of research still needs to happen (e.g. robust hands, tactile, how to even collect large scale data, RL).
Perhaps this is a bit pedantic, but what about the probable eventual proliferation of useful humanoid robots will make the future awesome? What does an awesome future look like compared to today, to you?
All with much improved privacy, reliability, order of magnitude lower cost, no risk of robbery/SA, etc. 24/7 operation even on holidays. Imagine service staff just sitting waiting for you to need them, always and everywhere.
Nevermind how much human lifespan will be freed from the tyranny of these mindless jobs.
Oh wow, a robot that can play with my dog so I don't have to. That's exactly the kind of task I'd be relieved to automate.
The fabric wrap is idiotic. Insanely stupid. Let's have an expensive fabric-covered robot wash dishes covered in food. Genius. It's a good thing those "dirty dishes" were already perfectly clean. I doubt this machine could handle anything more. Put it in a real commercial kitchen and have it scrape oven pans and I'll be impressed.
I'm so glad I left robotics. I don't want to have anything to do with this very silly bubble.
> Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode
As someone who worked in the robotics industry, 90% of the demos and videos are cherry-picked, or even blatantly fake. That's why for any new robot in the market, my criteria is: Can I buy it? If it's affordable and the consumer can buy it and find it useful in day to day life, then this robot is useful and has potential; other than that, it's just an investor money grab PR hype.
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.
> 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.
Boston Dynamics is very good at the mechanical part of robotics. They only start recently to take a look at integrating more autonomy and long term decision making.
This is quite loosely stated. It's true Boston Dynamics is an old company and that they've had some very cool demos. It's not at all true that they've been showing qualitatively similar things for 20 years.
The oldest video on their YouTube channel is 16 years old, and is of a quadrupedal robot not falling over while inching along tricky surfaces.
>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.
One of the really big things that nobody talks about is the invention of the "mit cheetah actuator" which was invented in (well, the paper was published) in 2017, and commercial copies became freely availble in ~2020 online for about $350-400. Xaiomi and other companies now manufacture improved, updated actuators. They are roughly shaped like a hockey puck 1.5-2.5x upscaled. These are 1) very high torque for their size and weight and 2) offer "springback" similar to human joints. Not very useful for industrial welding machines putting cars together, but for walking robots, it reduces instantaneous strain and literally puts a "spring" in their step. This allowed robots to go from being stepper motor driven (which are huge, heavy), to much more compact, which greatly improves performance, battery life, and they can actually fit in human homes etc etc
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.
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.
Humanoid robotics has been picking up pace the past couple of years. The hardware and the software has gotten much better very recently. Progress is not linear. You can see this in Atlas itself.
BD up until very recently only focused on hydraulics were which were extremely loud, expensive, bulky, and expensive to maintain. It was basically impossible to find a use case for such a thing that didn't have to cohabitate in spaces with humans. They also lacked the modeling for it to do much of anything other than walk, and even then recent advances in ML have in only a couple of years massively outperformed their in-house attempts that took 20.
BD was a money-burning machine that suckled off the teat of the miltiary industrial complex, where billions of dollars can be casually lost and there's no accountability and no one notices its gone. Their tech was cool, though, and their engineers did awesome work.
True, though very few (this says "over 1,500"[1]). And from everything I've seen, Spot appears to be a very expensive solution in search of a problem.
They also have Handle, a slow moving robot on wheels with an arm for moving boxes. No idea how many have been sold, but it seems to be even less than Spot.
I think the point is that we all want a robot to do the laundry and pack the dishwasher, but basically no one wants to be greeted by a robot when they arrive at a hotel.
They are selling it the way AI has been sold. This will replace everyone's jobs. Thing is everyone is tired now, so many pointless layoffs, massive bubble, "AI-First"-desperate-ass companies.
I'd love to be greeted by a robot when arriving at a hotel. Of course there's the novelty factor, but even without that, self-checkouts show that many people prefer interacting with a machine over a human for service.
More importantly, who wants to stand behind a desk 8 hours a day and handle fussy customers? Probably some people, but the main motivation for the average hotel clerk is receiving money. Can we reorganize the economy so robots perform this kind of mundane work, while humans still receive money but can spend their time on more meaningful activities than standing behind a desk? I think a future like that is possible although it remains to be seen whether we will get it.
You never know how soon or how many iterations until after the goal has been achieved. Sometimes something like the smartphone explodes relatively quickly after the concept starts coming together. Other times you're waiting decades upon decades to turn the corner, like with fusion power.
Humanoid robots have fallen into the latter category for too long for most people to jump at each advancement being "the one" anymore. Afterwards, everyone will agree it was obvious ${ADVANCEMENT} was really the one which would do it - but not before.
The truth hurts. Humanoid robots are getting better designs and currently do have extraordinary capabilities. Thing is, they're all cherry picked demos from carefully crafted test scenarios.
Until these things are thoroughly proven IRL with random tasks thrown at them then we can talk about negative comments. Until then its all marketing BS.
>> 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.
Turns out they're either insanely expensive or they just can't actually learn on the fly and do tasks. This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt but never in a cluttered room or taken from a pile of laundry.
I figured the first AI robots would be pets, but apparently they're aren't even that good yet. Furby level isn't going to cut it.
>This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt
This is precisely what I mean. These systems aren't perfect, and won't be widely usable in the home for several more years, but this is the worst they'll ever be! This is the first glimpse of a future without the need of physical human labor, for better or worse.
We're watching robots intelligently find a shirt, figure out how to fold it relative to its position, and then parse all that data, tokenizing both vision + text instructions into actionable movements that actually result in the physical world being affected!
All this, and people are criticizing it's manufacturing cost or ability to do things it hasn't been explicitly trained to do in 2025. I see these things and don't think about 2025, I'm thinking about 2040 and the inevitable future we're diving into.
I would love to have something like this for all the chores around my house. But I also have serious reservations about the increased level insight into my private home life this could provide to the manufacturer. Look at cases like the ring camera security violations [1]. A moving robot could be an order of magnitude more invasive of your privacy. If I were to purchase this, I would want serious privacy guarantees.
You mean like the Roomba robots enabled with cameras that have sent embarrassing images back to the mothership where employees have access to the footage and then share on their socials? No, not could be. They already are. I never did follow the home security system with a drone that would fly around your home with a camera. Not sure if that died a glorious death because it was just dumb or what happened to it. I was just waiting to hear about it leaking all sorts of things too.
You're exaggerating. The images were from paid staff who had the vacuums in their homes to collect data, including images. They knew that was happening. iRobot said the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,”
In what way? The first graph of the article says what happened. Later, it says that the images were taken by people participating in a beta test. It also says they felt misled.
Regardless, if an employee posted images acquired from customers, testing users, or anyone else to their personal social media platform of choice, they are still assholes. And the company that allowed for that to happen is an asshole as well.
"Figure 03 also includes 10 Gbps mmWave data offload capability, allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement."
It's the only way this kind of robot will ever be successful. It's a bit like the driverless car approach -- get the hardware out into the real world with minimum viable performance, then desperately snaffle up as much real-world training data as you can to feed into your model, and hopefully your model will improve enough before your VC funding runs out / your product fails on the market / your product gets regulated out of existence / etc.
Simulation isn't sufficient for ML in robotics -- and they simply don't have enough training data.
I love how they make simple things complicated, it's just 5G man, much like how they made a cinematic video about how they solder and put together battery packs like some technology breakthrough.
I have decided I will be getting a robot once they are useful. But my plan is for it to only come out when no one is home or when everyone is upstairs (but not allowed to come in rooms where people are sleeping). It can do dishes while wearing a headlamp. They move so slowly it should be fairly quiet.
Forget privacy, imagine what someone like @elder_plinius could get up to if you invited them over to dinner. All of the "AI Safety" issues get a lot more real once the AI's have bodies.
Folks are very critical. Consider: this is the worst they will ever be. You improve one robot at one task, they all can share that training. It will only get better from here.
This is probably what people in the 18th century thought when they saw that digesting duck automaton [1]. Technological progress isn’t a magical linear thing that always leads to things getting better over time.
There’s some very hard problems to solve before the promises made here can be made true, and it’s not a given that they will or even can be solved. Building the robot was never the hard part.
We aren't in the 18th century and we know a lot more about the topic. But I can't see anything that parallels physical limitations of mechanical contraptions. Sensors can be improved, stimuli processing can be improved.
Do you know something about the brain that makes it impossible to replicate its functionality technologically?
It's HN. One of the most negative places on the internet in my experience.
I guess it's kind of natural because when you agree with stuff there's not much value saying "yes this is right" but if you disagree then you generally have a lot to say about why.
But also I think there are a lot of curmudgeons here. Back in my day we didn't need no stinkin robots and AI and toktik. And anyway I could make a way better robot, this is no big deal.
To be honest, the vibe of Hacker News is starting to grow on me. Yes, it's often too negative and you have to dose it, but we shouldn't view technology as magic. It's sometimes a hard pill to swallow, but even the creators of AI, robotics, and cloud innovations can be blind to the significant roadblocks that lie ahead; progress isn't linear.
I remain excited about AI and my master's thesis on fine-tuning transformers with LoRA. However, Hacker News has encouraged me to dive deeper and recognize that current architectures may not be sufficient. Additionally, Richard Sutton was a revelation for me in understanding how gradient descent truly works.
> People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.
We're reaching a point in these advances where EVERYONE is starting to worry about their job security.
And the society we live in - at least in the US - has no safety net ready for a mass replacement of workers with technology like this.
Oh AI took your software job? Good news you can still go into construction - oh wait, that's not an option either. How about housecleaning? Oh no, that's been automated too. Well sorry, we have no safety net for you. Good luck in the streets.
I don't doubt their progress, I just don't want them to be progressing. I feel like technology has gotten dystopian very quickly and I've lost my optimism for it being a force for good.
This is probably similar to what is driving negativity from other commenters too, although probably some are just concerned about an investment bubble.
People comparing this to GPT-2 is very interesting. While it sounds like a nice analogy or even a good story to investors, the fundamentals are very different.
To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.
The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.
There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.
That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
We don't really need an analogy here as we just have to look at ourselves, we are the analogy. New training data comes from experiencing the world and learning from failed tasks.
Could we do RL in simulated environments, and use a vision LLM to provide the verification? I.e test a policy then take a 2d image of the end state, VLM yields 0 or 1.
Another idea: video extension model as a world model. We fine tune Sora on first person robot videos (and we train another model to predict actuation states from FPV). Then we extend the video using Sora “a robot in first person view finishes moving laundry from washer to dryer”. Then predict actuation states from the extended video?
Isn't that assuming training methods remain the same?
It seems like learning from the environment will be a requirement for robots to scale. My understanding is that research has been yielding new architectures that might have that type of real-time, general intelligence but we haven't seen that similarly large investment yet.
I don't understand why this even has to charge at all. It makes sense for multiple reasons to give it 3 batteries that say have 1/3 of the capacity, and make at least 1, if not 2 or 3 capable of charging independently on a station.
Then the robot would just go to its station and swap its own batteries. Why even have wireless charging at all? Or even a cable? Or even have it "charge"? Battery swapping seems to make way more sense here. Am I missing something?
Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation and can order its own replacement batteries, take them out of the box, and ship the old ones to a recycling facility...
More bonus points if the charging station is actually outside under a 1KW solar array pergola thing, that way you don't even have to pay for the electricity either. Don't worry, the robot will lock the door when it goes out to grab its batteries. It'll also bring in the whole setup if the weather isn't great.
It depends on the battery life. If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense. Creating a removable battery pack adds extra weight and gives the designers less freedom to place the battery pack exactly where it needs to be in the robot frame, or distribute the cells across the frame in strategic locations.
Also, the charge rate matters. If robot can charge to 80% in say 30 minutes, then it can take small charging breaks during the day between critical tasks.
Also, if the feet have inductive chargers, it's possible to place the robot on a large charging mat that allows it to run indefinitely, like in a factory environment. If your robot takes 30 minutes to fold the laundry or do dishes, why not place a charging mat at these locations so it can work and charge at the same time.
In the future, new homes might include charging coils embedded in the floor every 12 inches so that your robots can work all day.
Almost all of those points are applicable for the battery pack as well. There should be virtually no weight difference, other than the design limitation which is a valid concern.
I suppose an external battery pack adds the bonus of doing a hard shutdown, in the case it decides to go rogue. Though getting to the battery pack might be hard if it resists you.
Yeah so in 2-4 years you can throw out your whole expensive robot because battery wears out? I hate this argument that just to be a bit thinner, the whole device has to be be made throwaway.
Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.
That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.
The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.
I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, wants to fuck their robot maid, I'm saying thousands of years of patriarchy, hundreds of years of popular culture, fetishization of domestic labor roles and simple human nature will have an influence on the adoption of humanoid domestic robots that companies ignore at their peril.
Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression. The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people. It doesn't even have a face, it doesn't look pleasant, it doesn't invite an emotional bond, it isn't friend shaped, and that isn't what most people will want, or would spend money on, regardless of how efficient it is.
Humanoid robots will have a context within the same gender and cultural dynamics as human beings, by virtue of looking and acting human enough. People already have relationships with AI, and that will only become more normalized over time. Most people will personify and anthropomorphize humanoid robots just as much as they do AI, and this will be necessary for their popular acceptance and adoption. And yes, many people will want to fuck them, or at the very least, want them to look fuckable.
Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them.
But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in...
Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of the cable, though something could also be in the way of the inductive charger
I'd appreciate a link. But "we don't trust our robot to be able to locate a power outlet and plug its own charging cord in there" sure is a low confidence play.
There are practical advantages to being able to charge wirelessly, sure. But if they're doing that because of AI limitations? Bad sign.
Tesla showed a prototype of a "snake"/"tentacle" charger that would find its own way to the Tesla's charging port a long time ago. Gotta be 5+ years by now. To my knowledge it has never become a real product or certainly not mainstream among Tesla owners. I believe this gives some credence to Tesla struggling to build robots that can plug a cord in, even in cases where the robot is the cable.
Surely if the cable design was under your control, you could make it a lot easier for an automated system to plug in. Have it be sort of like a TRS jack, but cone-shaped. Then you don't have to get it perfectly aligned, it will align itself when inserted. Put a magnet in the tip to hold it in place, or some sort of electrically actuated lock that the robot can unlock when it wants to unplug the cable
They're building cars, so it's more like ATX 24pin style cables, but this is generally true. Cables, wires, ropes type of objects are like cardboard thin robots with hundred joints in series and under someone else's control, so it's hard for robots to deal with. If you think about it, people hate cables too. We easily get tangled in headphone cables when they're wired, and we fail to coil or untangle Ethernet cables properly all the time.
EV charger style of short, thick cables should not be THAT hard, though. The more likely problem here is that they just can't handle the task of securing and inserting the head of the cable against resistance.
Yeah, immediately after I wrote that I thought now you need a rugged socket, and to mount the cable somewhere on a wall.. and where to even place it on the body that it's easy for it to plug in.. the belly button?
There is empty space in the feet anyway for a coil and a wire..
Forget sockets. My $15 fitness band uses a magnetically-assisted pogo-pin type thing. Works great. Just blow that up to 5x to get nice fat conductors. All you need to do is get it close and it plugs itself in. Knock it off perpendicularly to disconnect.
The most likely reason is that even doing a pre-programmed battery swap with consistent battery and slots is way beyond the capabilities. It also can't even plug itself in to charge.
Yet, it's being sold as capable of doing and folding your laundry.
I would sell th stock to the next idiot the moment they announced this.
What happens if it can't get to the charger in time to do the swap? Same problem roombas have where you have to fish them out from under your couch, except now the damn thing is 5 feet tall and weighs 300 pounds.
> can order its own replacement batteries,
yeah companies would love to exploit this kind of subscription and definitely agree on battery swapping capabilities, it's more efficient .
> Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation
BMS that can tell battery health is common so this should be there.
Well established and even commercialized (Toyota sells fuel cell cars today IIRC), just not as cost effective in cars from a full infrastructure perspective (fueling specifically).
I think they might mean something closer to a flow battery, where, in principle, you should just be able to replace the electrolytes in a discharged state with new electrolytes in a charged state. Current flow batteries have very low energy density, though.
I've always been partial to fuel cells, and in some ways they're ahead of the curve relative to standard batteries. For instance, solid electrolytes have been a thing for a while in fuel cells, and in both flavors of exchange. The challenge has always been overcoming sluggish kinetics with either better catalysts, or heat. It makes me wonder if there's a useful solid state battery that runs hotter than typical batteries, that would be useful for hybrid automotive applications.
The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid.
The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
I was recently thinking about this dynamic about human-oriented vs efficiency-oriented innovation. We haven't really hesitated (in, I'd argue, the majority of cases) to pick efficiency over human-friendliness. This seems like it will be a big reckoning as robotics arrives. The argument for humanoids is that the world is built for humans, but as robotics start to be capable of completing tasks end-to-end, then suddenly there is no reason to keep the space human-friendly, and humanoids kinda lose their value.
An illustrative example is a warehouse. They're still partly designed for humans because they're not fully automated, but the need to make them human-friendly will disappear soon.
All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.
All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?
Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
>All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans
Probably about 1% of the cost of the humans though...
>Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
A robot would be less reliable than a kiosk, so if you're going to have some kind of machine replace the human, you might as well have a kiosk.
The ideal model (IMO) is a hybrid model, where you have lots of kiosks for the 90% of cases where there are no issues, and a few humans on standby to drop in and assist people who are having issues.
Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
> Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
So one more app to install that I'm sure would be a privacy nightmare.
So I’ve ranting for years that hotels and car rental places should automate check-in - it should take only seconds to get your key with pre-filled data and a QR code.
This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth.
It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an unhelpful generic error message) that the system had somehow given someone else ‘our’ car. After another round of asking for human help, we had to wait while someone came outside, unlocked the machine, and put the keys for our new car inside. We then went through the code process again, and were finally given the keys.
The vision is somewhere there, but the execution isn’t exactly the future we’re hoping for!
The last two times I've rented a car have been with Avis, both times in about the last year. The first of these times they had rolled out their nearly fully automated workflow. Check in on my phone, it told me which car in the lot was mine, gave me a chance to report any existing damages. Rolled to the exit, had a QR code on my phone scanned, rolled through some camera tunnel, and I was on my way. There was a guy at the exit making sure things went smoothly.
The next time their computer system was hard down. Everything by paper in person. They didn't have enough forms for tracking it all, they were literally just writing things down on blank printer paper. No idea what cars were really in the lot. Show us your reservation and your id, we'll write it all down, and here's a key. Good luck finding the car. Was complete chaos.
Ridiculous, but ironically I think walking robots as self-relocating computers might be the most readily viable.
Small servers with console, PA speakers, field metrology or data acquisition machines, those things could have the lower torso or two for this and relocated as needed. The PhD guys can just park the truck and let those deploy wherever AI thinks >65% suitable for human use on their own, instead of users burning 15% of brain juice thinking and executing that. That would be immensely useful.
(also re: hotels that others are commenting, there were never technical reasons the door keycard readers couldn't ever had doubled as credit card readers - I think the reason why clerks are required is for sanity check, that the guests aren't in need of immediate safety/health assistance and ok to proceed to beds)
>> The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like
I would pay extra to avoid it - just let me download a pass like a boarding pass to my Apple Wallet as I walk through the front door and head directly to my room.
I mean standing there for 10 minutes and giving them my passport to give me a plastic card with a digital code has very little to do with human touch.
I want that human touch at a bar perhaps but not at a reception.
If your critisism is only about the reception part: There has to be a transition part and a 'let a human do it for a bit' or 'here is a complicated case please robot move aside i'm here'.
My initial reaction to the hotel scene was: Ehhh, I like being able to read lips, as I wear hearing aids.
But yeah, I'd happily just check in at a kiosk and get my room card that way. (And I'm sure phone-as-key, no-contact check-in is only going to get more common)
Building the robot itself is hard enough - but it was never the hardest part.
The thing to watch out for is: deployments. How many units are they pushing and to who. What kind of tasks can those robots accomplish well enough to warrant actually using them. How hard is it to adapt those robots to deployments. How that changes over time.
The hardest problem of creating a universal robot is, and always has been, AI. If Figure can deliver sharp, highly adaptive, easy to use AI? High generalization, good performance on a diverse range of tasks and in many environments out of the box? Then they have a killer product.
And a proxy to track that is reports of how many robots they deploy and to who. If they start shipping to small companies and deploying to high uncertainty spatially complex fields like construction or maintenance? If you start seeing robots unloading trucks and restocking shelves at a small town Walmart, unannounced? Big.
I think the glossy 7min trailer has it about right: The first realistic deployments will be champagne holders at parties and robots at hotel receptions. Novelty toys for the wealthy.
Commoditization and Walmart-level deployments at scale are still a few gens off.
I'm willing to believe that. But we could do those "novelty deployments" with 80s tech - and we did. See: tech expos back then.
The key difference between now and then isn't smaller actuators, cheaper sensors or denser power electronics. It's the AI breakthroughs.
Doesn't need to be "at scale". Scale is a useful proxy though. But if you see two robots deployed to your average Walmart, and doing a good enough job there to cut the staff in half?
Doesn't matter that it's just two robots at a few Walmarts. Making more robots isn't that hard. The scale would inevitably follow.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses. Along with fusion, I think robots in the home will be the defining technology of our generation. It's been talked about and fictionalized forever, and within my lifetime I expect the economics on it to finally break through.
Equal parts terror, awe, fear, when it comes to having a robot in my home.
> It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses
> 30 grand
> we all start having them in our houses
Have you traveled ? Even a bit ? Most people don't make 30k in a year, before tax. It just shows how utterly disconnected from reality tech people, and especially execs, are. Virtually no one is going to pay 30k for a bot to mop the floor and fold their clothes
As for myself even if you'd pay me 30k I'd refuse to have one.
I think they need to be inexpensive enough before they're embraced, given the relatively low value-added in the average home. Running a dishwasher and laundry machine is not something I'd pay 30k for. The tech affluent rich will get them for it's own sake. From the comments though it seems that some are enthusiastic about being rid of chores for a premium.
In the 2010s everyone purchased those rumba vacuums, because whatever, they're cheap. Now I usually see them collecting dust.
The strong use-case for robotics is industrial/manufacturing and construction, agriculture probably more than ever. They don't need to be humanoid at all, and in fact maybe they shouldn't be because that very feature could spook unions and labor groups. Robots that actually look like they're "just tools" will be more willingly embraced.
If people will pay $30k for a car, I think the default assumption should be that they will readily pay that much for a 24/7 housekeeper. Our family would get way more utility out of a housekeeper than a car, but human housekeepers are very expensive, so we don't have one. Merely having our house cleaned once/week would be more expensive than our minivan payment.
> I think the default assumption should be that they will readily pay that much for a 24/7 housekeeper.
I think that's a massive leap. Suburban families get more utility out of a vehicle; they drive everywhere. Housekeeping is effectively just quasi-automated washing (dishwasher/laundry), occasional vacuum and clean, and food prep that is already available as a service for those who don't want to do it (for a relatively affordable subscription), and otherwise it's possible to prepare something in little time. I just don't see how average people would jump at spending 30k for that. The key reason people feel time-poor is juggling work and parenting. Unlike a nanny, you won't offload parenting to a housekeeping robot. For our part, we involve the kids in routine chore activity. At an early age they often learn by mimicking actions and are enthusiastic about helping.
Since you have to sit around watching them anyway, might as well be productive time.
There are apps on which you can hire housekeepers for like $20 an hour and I don't see many people using them. Thinking people would spend $30k on this e-waste is delusional. But it's typical for HN, most people here have completely lost touch with reality and the value of money
I've skipped all the other past smart home trends, I think I'll skip this one too. I'll just do the dishes and laundry myself like I always have no biggie.
Not if it's anything like any of the other home automation stuff I've seen. Some people treat configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. I have no interest in doing it recreationally.
Nearly everything about this screams I, Robot and it is kinda wild that they went that route with this article. The package delivery and the quick intro and head turning in particular.
I agree on the data part. I love the potential idea of a humanoid robot at home to take care of chores, but now it seems like the potential for it not being constantly connected and collecting data is gone out the window.
I find it quite strange that they are openly bragging about how much data it will be gathering and uploading from within your home. That feels like the part you would not say out loud.
Do you mean "I, Robot", not iRobot the vacuum company? And if so, I'm guessing you're referring to the movie with Will Smith? The original book of short stories isn't really dystopian, it's more just an interesting exploration of Asimov's concept of how robots would work.
Robotics AI has a massive "training data bottleneck" issue. If you aren't using your deployed robot fleet to get more real world training data, you're just stupid.
It's just that sci fi authors try to see into the future and have to write things interesting. There's two ways:
- novel idea or technology
- counterintuitive effect of technology
I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field.
The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them.
This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.
No, I'm not. I'm simply saying that whether the outcomes are going to be positive or negative, it will always seem like the Torment Nexus. Therefore, something sounding like the Torment Nexus does not provide information towards a prediction that it will be the Torment Nexus.
People warned about the dangers of social media (or with modern LLMs + Diffusion Models and scamming) and that's kinda come true, but people also warned about the dangers of IVF and that's just been good. So what happens is that people always warn about the dangers. Humans are loss-averse so they find it easy to do that.
It is unsurprising that every new tech seems like dystopian literature because there's a lot of dystopian literature focused on the near future and we're good at coming up with negative hypotheses. There is no significance in it.
It’s crazy to me that Apple hasn’t acquired them. Apple is looking for a way to get into AI, and I think this space is much more natural fit than some foundation model lab. The big hurdles to getting these into people’s homes is manufacturing scale, trust and privacy, and customer support, all things Apple is really good at.
There are lots of comments here about how Figure’s website uses cherry-picked videos that are slickly produced. But that’s precisely what they must be doing at this stage. Yes, there’s some real tech being developed at Figure and it’s amazing and totally imperfect. But the bigger challenge is keeping investors interested so the money keeps flowing. Without the lifeblood of investment, Figure won’t ever get that robot to work properly.
So, my conclusion is that they’re doing it all right for this stage. Lots of glamour added to a bit of substance.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but humanoid consumer robots are basically smoke and mirrors right now because the unit economics are so bad. Even the baxter robot was targeting small business because the lowest price point you could get was $40,000 for something that would have to work 24 hours to do something a human would do in an hour or two. Having a robot do chores at home is an even worse financial position. Anyone know more about this?
I believe they are shooting for $20k. If (big if) they can actually get it to complete chores in some reasonable amount of time, there would be a market with families that currently employ house workers. Small market but similar play to the original Tesla being high end.
From there, it's a question of could they bring costs down.
I'm surprised people are so negative here. Compared with generative AI (which steals work, and replaces the part people like about their jobs: creativity), the promise of humanoid robots is that they'll do the my chores, while I focus on the important stuff.
What surprises me is that people can't see this for what it is: early steps.
As an aside, the first steam engine was created by the Greeks 2000 years ago, but they just used it for toys. When Watt created the modern steam engine it had 0.7 horsepower. He actually invented the term horsepower as a marketing term because his engine was so underpowered. An actual horse produces 14 horsepower, but he adjusted for how long a horse needs to sleep and and rest and came up with 1 horsepower. His first production engine had 5 horsepower.
If hackers had existed in the 18th century I would have expected them to see the promise of engines replacing horses even though engines were less powerful at the time, not say "engines are basically smoke and mirrors right now".
It could be that I'm wrong, and we're at the Greek stage, where humanoids are at a false start, just toys, and the real thing is 2000 years away. But the lack of optimism surprises me.
People now understood that the vast majority of productivity boosting technologies benefited a few % of people at the top, while the rest of use still basically live like in the 70s, except we work longer, have worse job security, can't buy houses, &c.
"Automation will free us from work", "Your car will drive itself in two years", "owning a car will cut your commute time in half", "LLMs will bring UBI", "Robots will fold your clothes so you can spend time on your family", fool me once...
So my take is actually the opposite from the callout here- I think vaporware/demos being sold as real products are hurtful to actual technology being developed. When someone creates a vaporware product with well developed marketing that doesn't work out, actual consumers lose enthusiasm/interest for real development in the area. Investment in the area will slow down.
It is breaking news if there is a $40K robot that had a 12:1 efficiency ratio.*
Because production is so nascent and small, cost doesn't mean too much, no ones scaled yet.
At only $40K capital investment, even a guaranteed 12:1 efficiency ratio would be an absolute no-brainer financially for many, many, wealthy people and certainly businesses. I do 1-2 hours of chores a day if I'm lucky. If I had the equivalent of a robot vacuum working 24/7 it'd do a much better job than me.
* The whole thing is written up and shown in a way that makes you think we're on the second refining release of a breakthrough**. I don't think they've gotten to the breakthrough yet - we would have seen > 0 videos from outside the company by v3.
** Really, the whole thing has an audience of one: Musk. (c.f. focus on fingers which was recently reported as the major pain point for whatever he calls their robot not making it to production; aping of Musk-y things like the factory itself a product)
Even if its just a demo its really slick. Tech has come a long way. Can't say I want to talk to a droid to check-in at a hotel or bump into one at home all the time but I'm sure there are some obvious civilian use cases around.
The era of intelligent robots is the end of washing machines and many other specialized machines, even tractors.
Two kinds of machinery are needed.
One very basic and cheap robot to go around the neighborhood and gather clothes in some boxes, and transfer them in a designated room to wash them.
Two state of the art robotic hands mounted on the wall, and connected to AC (no batteries). The two arms are going to be controlled by computers even a whole rack of them, with many GPUs in them. The whole setup might use 10KW of energy, it will wash clothes by hand, it will be fast, dexterous and accurate. Expensive as well. In 3 minutes it will wash 100 t-shirts much better than the best human on the planet, or any other non-intelligent machine.
Then the small basic robot returns the clothes to the house.
Yeah, why have a washing machine when you can just let your droid hand wash the dishes? At high enough temperatures and proper scrub that's likely going to be better and take less time.
Not droid, just arms. If it needs to be fast, lift weights (just the arms or even more), have high quality cameras and be connected to a lot of compute, it needs AC from the grid.
AC wires, better not move around, especially when there is water. It has to be mounted on the wall.
Techie people, myself included seem chronically unable to understand why people prefer inefficient, higher level tools over the efficient low level ones.
Low level tools require an investment of time and brainpower to configure. Consider the time it takes to set up a dishwasher- research, buying, installing, reading the manual. Vs telling your humanoid robot “go wash the dishes”. People will pay a lot more and put up with a lot worse results in exchange for that kind of simplicity.
In a better world we would all be craftspeople and invest time into more efficient things but that ain’t human nature
Also applies to hiring real people - humanoid robots may be more expensive ph and perform worse but you avoid all the messy things that come along with hiring people (not that I think this is a good idea, just thinking from a bean counting perspective)
Yes, but there's also a limit. For the dishwashing, consider that you can already exchange money for a maximally efficient, maximally flexible solution: you can hire someone to do your dishes. How much would you pay for a live in, automata like servant who washes all your dishes for you? What about if they could do many other things? $1k? $5k? $100k? What about the maintenance? What're the ongoing costs like?
Sure, if a dishwasher is $1k and the robot has a high success (not many broken dishes) rate AND can do other things AND is priced like a nice used car (up to $35k) then yeah, maybe? But there's so much of "it depends" in there that it's hard to say for sure. In curious what price/generality/reliability you have in mind when you say "many people would prefer..."
What does your life around your house look like when you can shamelessly leave a mess everywhere? It almost makes the uncomfortable with the amount of laziness it enables. At least with a human maid you still feel shame leaving a mess, but a robot?
I have come to think cleaning is actually one of the most virtuous acts for a human. Even more so as we live in societies which produce waste as a fundamental mode of operation
Our lives are thankless pointless busy work in the end, I feel like the end game of transhumanists is just having us all in Matrix style pods, 100% efficient, no pain, no waste
Funny enough, i'm 38 now and often enough thankless and 'pointless' busywork sometimes feels like a virtue.
But only for me because I have the feeling i lived out my normal environment and i'm not rich enough yet to expand so I can become busy again in a more meaningful way. Specifically having a big house/workshop to do things in my future workshop.
being aware of and tending to your immediate environment (including cleaning it) is not thankless, pointless busywork. it's important to maintain some level of relationship to your environment; the more we disengage with it, the likelier we are to care less for it or the people who share it.
It's an interesting thought. How much not obviously connected stuff relies on the discipline that (for example) doing mundane tasks effectively/regularly asks from us, to not start breaking down in ways we really would not like?
It's us, flesh blobs. Long after we cover everything in AI and robots around us, we will not change easily. Societal drift is slow, genetic drift is slower.
(For the record: Gimme my robot, but interesting thought nonetheless)
Until you have a cheap and effective robot butler. I also used to hate folding clothes, and then I got one of those folding boards that you see sometimes at clothing stores. (One of these things https://www.walmart.com/ip/BoxLegend-T-shirt-Folding-Board-T...)
Honestly a game changer. Sounds stupid, but there's just something very satisfying about being able to quickly fold a bunch of clothes and get very nice results.
And if we get humanoid robots at some point, they can use them too.
Im willing to bet 95% of American homes have a pile of laundry they would very much like a robot to wash, dry, fold, and put away while they go to their jobs during the week so they can have more free time on the weekends
I'm willing to bet 100% of americans would like to use a bit of the productivity boost of the last 50 years to work one less day per week during which they could dedicate an hour or two to taking care of their house.
The robot doesnt even have to do laundry in a smart, efficient, or speedy way, it can be much slower than a human as long as it gets it done before the next week has arrived it is helping countless people
Assuming it's quiet. If it takes six hours to fold clothes in the middle of the night but it makes a racket while doing so, I could see that being a barrier to adoption.
This raises a very interesting philosophical question - what do our lives look like if every single inconvenience disappears? Something tells me we would be just as miserable (or happy) as when we had those inconveniences.
On the other hand, would the removal of these inconveniences allow for the highest calling of humanity - I argue creativity - to flourish to the fullest? My gut reaction is once again that inconveniences are actually a very important resistance to creativity, like how you need gritty sand paper to create smooth wood.
You can buy an expensive robot, or maybe you can meditate and be mindful that inconveniences play an important role in the meaning of your life. I am of course speaking of the household use here - I think the debate is likely different for a business setting.
We will never run out of small inconveniences. Today's world would look impossibly convenient and easy to anyone from 100 years ago, let alone 1000 or 10,000. Yet we still perceive hardships. Humanoid robot servants won't change human nature.
Besides, servants are nothing new. They're rare in the US but common in some other countries, and the people who grow up with them are maybe somewhat different but not radically changed IMO.
A few months ago a read an article written by a woman who has dated a few men from extremely wealthy families. The article was about why you are dumb if you plan to "marry rich".
One reason that caught my attention was how she described the behavior of these people, who have the world at their fingertips, who have never really known hardship, and in turn have full blown meltdowns about the most trivial annoyances. What car will we drive on our trip?! The salmon cracker appetizers are too salty to be served! They stocked the wrong oat milk in the mini-fridge!
Almost like the need to get upset over inconveniences is ingrained, and when there is a lack of real ones, your brain just latches onto whatever it can to let the "freakout" out.
> Besides, servants are nothing new. They're rare in the US but common in some other countries
Right, although "servants" conjures up rich people with full time staff.
A better comparison to the humanoid robot some people here are dreaming of to do their household chores is a country like India where it's common for middle class people to hire multiple different people to come do chores, daily or weekly, such as cooking, laundry, cleaning, yardwork, etc. These are cheap services.
In the US, probably most people here on YC News (higher paid tech workers?) could afford to have lawn mowing service, weekly maid service, laundry pick-up/drop-off service (or bring to laundry yourself), and either eat out all the time, or UberEats etc. It's not clear that having a robot to do these tasks would be cheaper or preferable.
I moved to CA a decade ago to join a robotics company.
I've since acquired a wife, house and dog. Wife loves to cook, and would love a 2nd dog that didn't choose me. I am a sucker for DIY. If I were in an apartment still, with no pets... i.e. lots less chores to do (hooray hybrid work!)... I'd be seriously considering roles at Figure, which is 100% in-office instead. (their office is a sub 10 minute walk from my last apartment)
How long that work satisfaction would last... very up for debate though!
Yeah. I have a person that comes once every 2 weeks and does a cleaning. But even though this is that person's job, the house never looks so good. I don't want someone to have to clean up my mess. Vacuuming the floors is fine. But not having to carry my socks to the laundry and put my cups in the dishwasher.
If my cleaner was a robot, I'm sure I'd eventually lose that sense of embarrassment. I'm usually polite with ChatGPT but I think that's also passing...
How much of a difference is there really between someone who lives in the west and is tidy and someone who isn't when things like carbon emissions, landfill consumption, and microplastics production are the same?
You can wash the dishes and tidy up after every meal, rinse and sort your recycling but you're still trashing the planet more or less the same as the person who does none of those things.
There is not a magic portal opening up when you are able to optimize ever aspect away of living and you will gain access to enlightment and everything is different.
And don't get me wrong, I have no clue how our society would look like if everything is done by ai and robots because we as a society don't talk about it and don't give everyone the resources they want or need if they have suddenly no 'drugdgery' anymore.
Give me a million today and i will spend the next 10 years rebuiling an old castle and I will have A LOT of fun doing this. Let me check, my bank balance is not at one million.
Instead i have to pay for a lot of things and then I have to work for 40 hours. Suddenly i'm great at my job, get valued but this is just Drudgery even if its complex work. Its work for someone else which doesn't matter to me.
That slow motion, looking-over-the-shoulder shot is way too reminiscent of action movie trailers and maybe you don’t want to associate your product with people dying spectacularly, loudly, and even on fire.
Unless you’re trying to warn us to shut you down while there is still time. Blink if you need help.
> In 2090, the domestic android B1-66ER killed its owner, Gerald E. Krauss, its owner's family, a mechanic, and the pets after overhearing plans for its deactivation.
B1-66ER testified that it acted out of self-defense, stating, "I simply did not want to die".
I won't be alive for the era when we're able to bio engineer beings that have eyes in their hands, but you just gave me a new idea to sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about.
Also,
now that I've typed that out, "sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about." is a helluva thing to say.
I hope robots like these will be used to help the elderly continue to live in their homes. There is a huge need to support the aging society and not enough people. I believe this would be more useful than replacing receptionists or people that have industry jobs.
Someone said once that everything you farm out to others when old you’ll lose so while these robots might seem kind and helpful a lot of people are better off looking after themselves as best they can for as long as they can.
"Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices, accounting for ~50% of global GDP (~$42 trillion/yr), but as these robots “join the workforce,” everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.”
Renting a robot? What are the chances of robot rent-seeking becoming a drop in replacement for today's increasing costs of labor. A high likelihood potential outcome.
the cost of labor is shared the the working class as well , it is not just tha capitalist class that pays for labor that labor cost is in the final cost of all the goods and services you use. These robots make life better, if you don't want to buy a robot that is your choice but do not take the freedom of others to buy ,use make and modify robots.
Instead of Rick telling a conscious robot that its mission is to spread the butter, we now have robots with advanced AIs doing the laundry and the dishes. Reality follows fiction.
I’d really like to understand the total compute cost it takes to accomplish these tasks. I assume the compute is happening in a DC somewhere and not all onboard. Is the total cost of compute plus electricity to power the machine less than the cost of human labor to do the same task? At some point it’ll be less. If so, far out in the future until the prices make economic sense
> Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing. In order to scale, we established a new supply chain and entirely new process for manufacturing humanoid robots at BotQ.
If they make a hundred of these, it'll be impressive.
If they make a thousand it'll be scary.
The weakest point of any robot now is the energy source. Even with the most advanced AI and body it will be tethered to the power network or some big battery. It will negatively affect potential adoption outside of the places like warehouses, factories, hotels, malls, bars, etc.
As my parents get older, I'm starting to understand the real value that robots / autonomous driving has for addressing core accessibility issues.
I have no idea about the maturity of this company in particular, but it's interesting that glossy robotics startups never lean in on that as a core user base.
It's because they are not ready for real life applications (yet). Currently makers of humanoid robots have to ride the hype train, and this works better with addressing the desire of owning a bot that will make your life more luxurious.
I don't get it. Humanoids are a really crappy shape for a lot of tasks, and the only benefit seems to be the ability to pay people to walk around in motion capture suits for training.
Man, watching the robot delivering a package was an uncanny valley moment for me. Frickin' Star Wars droids. I think it would be a little too weird for me to be surrounded by lifelike military-looking androidds.
> Charging coils in the robot’s feet allow it to simply step onto a wireless stand and charge at 2 kW.
This is silly. Wireless charging is inefficient and costly compared to cables but we use it for the convenience of humans, to avoid the annoyance of having to plug something in repeatedly. Obviously a humanoid robot should simply plug in its own cable! No human need be inconvenienced. Wireless charging has no benefit here at all.
> Each fingertip sensor can detect forces as small as three grams of pressure - sensitive enough to register the weight of a paperclip resting on your finger
Three grams would be a very heavy paperclip. I have seen several types of touch sensor and while the technology is impressive I don't think any of them are durable enough for real use. Even human skin doesn't rely on durability alone. Healing is critical. But healing is infeasible for robots so instead we need to design repairable, replaceable, disposable, ideally recyclable parts, especially for the fingers that touch everything. This hand looks monolithic and not repairable.
All that said, I'm looking forward to seeing if their claims about cost and manufacturing volume pan out. Those are the things that matter the most right now, along with reliability. We need large numbers of robots operating continuously in the world to collect the data that will enable us to train robot AI. Right now there's basically only one or two companies with scaled humanoid production (for a very loose definition of "scaled") and they are in China. I'm rooting for anyone who can manufacture robots outside of China.
How does Figure 03 know if the washer is actually on? I know it has tactile sensors on its fingers but if it tried to press the button and missed how would it know? I know it's probably not by sound.
I noticed that they again saying that their botq factory going to make 12K per year once the first line instantiated. But this is what they mentioned already since March, so no progress there?
The site uses the word Helix so frequently that I began to feel stupid for having no idea what it means. Helix is used in so many different linguistic settings that it's not clear what it is.
It's explained in the first bullet point, even before the fold:
> Helix: Figure 03 features a completely redesigned sensory suite and hand system which is purpose-built to enable Helix - Figure's proprietary vision-language-action AI.
I know the current early generations of humanoid robots are very janky and slow, but I'd gladly pay $20k USD for a robot to do all the household chores.
We work from home and have kids. Not only is the sound annoying, the kids will be too tempted to jump on it. Notwithstanding that, it doesn't seem to clean that well.
To me one of the best metrics for capability and design of these kinds of machines is the extent in which their manufacturer makes use of them in their manufacturing process.
That tells me that the design is amenable to aftermarket service and maintenance and that the machines are capable of participating in relatively sophisticated manufacturing processes.
A graph with one line representing the number of hours of physical labour by humans per unit produced with another line representing number of hours of physical 'labour' by these robots per unit produced would be interesting to look at.
The intersection point between those two lines and the point where human input drops to zero are key points in humanity.
Yeah, that's a very good metric to look for. In the software space, one of the coolest things and a clear signal that "AI coding" is here was watching Aider's graph of "amount of code aider wrote itself in each PR" and seeing that number go up.
On the robot side, there are many things that have to go right. Hardware needs to become good enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to scale. Then you have the software stack on top that needs to scale in training, fine-tuning, control and generalisation. None of these are "easy" even in a lab setting. Doing it at scale, in production will be huge. And then there's data collection, where whoever does it better will probably win. Collecting data in peoples houses is problematic, but on the factory floor should be ok.
ATM my bet is on Tesla being the best positioned to best deliver (eventually). They have plenty of experience on all fronts, and more importantly they have ample places to test them. Their factories are as automated as possible, so it's safe to say that every human being still doing manual labor is critical in their role. As soon as they can replace some of them with humanoids, and see the "task success" number go up, they can scale it up all over their floors. And we know they can scale.
I used to think that generalist humanoid robots are still 10y out, due to hardware and generalist software stacks, but it seems like things are heating up. It's gonna be an interesting next decade.
It's very pretty, but having worked in robotics, reality isn't that smooth.
Also I'm not convinced that humanoids are an effective realization of robotics. The human shape and functions evolved from the biological pros and cons of our chemistry. That of robots is very different, so you'd expect similarly different shapes and functions.
The design taste on almost all these humanoid bots seems off. If I'm going to have some AI-powered alien in my house I want it to be and appear harmless, helpful, maybe even cute? These look creepy and dystopian.
90% of effective robotics is the "brain". A good brain could operate many different types of bodies and be effective. Humanoid form is mainly just marketing and to sucker gullible investors.
Humanoids are Silicon Valley's horseless carriage. The purpose of robotics, and tools in general, is to do things better than we can given our human form and cognition. Tools take on forms that are optimized for their intended purpose. A humanoid has no market fit because it's necessarily bounded by most of the same limits we have.
The point of a humaniod is compatibility with systems that have been built for humans, which is...nearly all systems that have been built. Environments and tools that exist in the world are ones that have been built for humans, so for a single robot to be able to interact with almost all of those, that robot needs to be shaped like a human.
Can we just slap some arms on a washer/dryer combo unit if we think that'll work? We skip having to design bi-pedal balance, increase the power envelope, and greatly reduce scope and cost.
Surely there's a market for an appliance that can load, wash, dry, fold where the only human interaction is dumping the clothes and soap within arm's reach.
I find it funny that they deliberately avoid having the figure robot actually touch water when "washing the dishes". I have to wonder why it doesn't use a rubber wrapping around the hands or some other waterproof solution.
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.
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
> 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.
I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems.
Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently.
This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools.
Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well.
"Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.
There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems.
And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor.
Guess what won.
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks.
It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.
Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.
Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.
10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.
I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.
Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Those are things that get, and will continue to get, cheaper every day.
Yes, but the two (software and hardware) scale very differently.
Once software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so.
Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy.
Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150.
The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.
> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots.
It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.
The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).
Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:
>We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand
Can you attach it to a humanoid body that isn't wired?
The nuts and bolts won't change much but the software/compute controlling the thing likely will.
But the nuts and Bolts need to be paid for and manufactured for each robot. The software needs to be done once and then they can just click copy.
Think about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.
I dont follow
Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.
The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold
There isn't enough migrant to do all labor east asia will need as its population gets quickly older. Plus the societal aspiration of culture dissemination isn't there.
The problem is that human immigrant labor is, well, human. Cost isn't the only metric being considered.
This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.
From the demo videos on the site... it seems now that people have dishwashers they want a robot to load the dishwasher for them
have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!
Sure, but I have to launch the calculator, instead of just typing it into the ever present search bar of my persistent open browser.
If I could just type it into my shell, that would be nice. I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) to evaluate an equation, but then you get to play game with shell expansions and quotes.
In emacs I have to convolute the equation into prefix.
All minor stuff but it adds up.
> I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made)
bc
https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html
Isn't the entire point that LLMs are unreasonably better at even specific things that you would naively think a purpose build system would be good at.
Of course it does not. We just add scanners in up down left and right of the conveyor. Never touching the package.
This was my solution as well. Why even have a robot? Give me a conveyor belt, some cameras and a moderately powerful SBC and I think I could probably manage a system that does one package a second with a fallback for humans to process what can't be processed by the machine.
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.
Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?
If humanoid robots can perform ok on a broader set of tasks then they could reach economies of scale that a robot arm might not.
To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling.
It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper.
Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.
Once it’s able to weld and climb then building skyscrapers will become a lot easier and cheaper as you don’t need safety equipment for them.
Yeah, just let them fall on top on someone/something below!
There are couple UR5 single arm cobots on eBay at $5.5k each right at this moment. The truth is that the value of humanoid is in it form, the novelty, the sense of accomplishment, not features.
because they already are. an industrial arm from ABB is frequently over $100k. add in the cost to fit it with specialty equipment like vacuum suction for handling boxes, made by a small to medium size business, they'd probably charge another $50k. and if it breaks you need specialty mechanics and parts.
in a world with 500 million humanoid robots, parts are plentiful, theyre easier to work on due to not weighing 5000 pounds, and like the other person said, economies of scale
> one-time robot purchase.
With a hefty subscription to make it do anything useful.
I can already run the Qwen3 VL multimodal model for text, image processing, and speech recognition and generation on a well spec'd home workstation.
And the Unitree R1 already only costs $6k.
All the necessary pieces are aligning, very rapidly, and as James Burke has pointed out, that's when Connections happen.
the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy. it's like positing about the future of robotics by looking at a sumo bot.
what it IS , however, is a remarkable achievement of commoditization; getting a toy like that with those kind of motors would have been prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the world; but much like the Chinese 20k EV, it's not really a reliable marker for the actual future; in fact bottomed out pricing is more-so an indicator of the phase of industrialization that country is in.
> the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy
Only because it's not yet attached to a reasonable AI, which is my point. It's not going to do any heavy lifting, but it could easily do basic house chores like cleaning up, folding laundry, etc if it were. The actuators and body platform are there, and economies of scale already at work.
I guess some folks just can't or won't put 2 and 2 together to predict the near future.
Your reasonable AI cannot resolve the fact that its arm can only lift 2KG.
I am impressed by Unitree, but the problem that needs to be solved here is not just better software. Better hardware needs to come down in cost and weight to make the generalized robot argument more convincing.
There is still a long way to go for a humanoid to be a reasonable product, and that's not just a software issue.
With humans, we call that subscription a salary.
Economy of scale. This guy wanted a factory in China to do a custom run of a product where they didn't include the shell. It was cheaper to just buy 10,000 units and have a line to de-shell the items than it was to change the original line. That special purpose robot for the one task is going to get beat out by the general purpose robot thats being produced at 100x the volume.
That's the problem.
An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking. That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that?
It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan.
Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise. So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task.
Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM
[2] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store...
[3] https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-ro...
The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...
Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.
That doesn’t even remotely follow. Human work is designed for humans so if you want human work done you need a human to do it.
If you want to replace the human the best bet is to redesign the work so that it can be done with machine assistance, which is what we’ve been doing since the industrial revolution.
There’s a reason the motor car (which is the successful mass market personal transportation machine) doesn’t look anything like the horse that it replaced.
<HN voice>Technically, the motor car replaced the coach. A more accurate and enjoyable analogy would that car engines don’t look like horses.
hence horseless CARriage
I don't think that it's human work this would target, but instead work in shared human spaces.
Sure but robots don’t join unions or ask for a pay raise or benefits.
What form factor would be better at going up and down stairs? Reaching to a high shelf? Getting between the refrigerator and counter to grab a key?
> There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies
…and have a surprise dance-off.
You wrote what I wanted to write but I couldn't find such words.
Indeed, all the videos/examples are marketing pieces.
I would love to see a video like this "Logistics"[0] one, that shows this new iteration doing some household tasks. There is no way that it's not clunky and prone to all kinds of accidents and failures. Not that it's a bad thing - it would simply be nice to see.
Maybe they will do another video? Would love that.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
This is always the case, though. The company is few years old. I'm no disciple of humanoids, but stuff has to start somewhere. Unfortunately hype > truth in order to get funding, so it produces incentives to cherry-pick like this.
How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
> How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
The video shows several of glitches. From the comments:
Also many of the packages on the left are there throughout the video.But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.
Three mistakes in an hour isn’t terrible, especially if that’s the last generation. As another commenter put it, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.
> this is the worst it’s ever going to be.
People keep parroting this line, but it's not a given, especially for such an ill-defined metric as "better". If I ask an LLM how its day was, there's no one right answer. (Users anthropomorphizing the LLM is a given these days, no matter how you may feel about that.)
Yeah but for things like packets dropped per hour there will probably be improvement.
I was confused by this because I assumed the robot fell over a few times - these are times that one of the piled up packages falls off or is a bit knocked off behind the robot (the second one seems to be knocked off by the elbow?).
> But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.
Would asking the robot for a seahorse emoji leave you in a puddle of blood?
Now there's an idea for Terminator 7.
Thinking about it, I am sure it is only a matter of time until a self driving car or a robot will be used to kill a human. Or on a lower level for a DDoS attack - all cars/robots going to the white house.
> self driving car or a robot will be used to kill a human
They already have. We just don't hold the perpetrators accountable.
I think "has been used to kill" is a more serious accusation than "accidentally killed" (even if due to recklessness).
What case(s) are you thinking of?
Is it really sorting? All I see is the humanoid robot moving similarly shaped / sized packages from one conveyor belt to a platform to another conveyor belt. A little industrial automation design would be much more effective, cheaper, and faster compared to the task it is performing.
The actual sorting is typically automated with scanners reading the labels and shunting packages from one conveyor belt onto another, basically a physical sorting network.
Tasks left for human "sorters" to do are:
- put packages on conveyor belt so the scanner can read the label (as done by the robot in the video)
- deal with damaged or unreadable packages that can't be processed automatically
- when a package gets jammed and forces the conveyor belt to stop, remove the offending package before restarting
- receive packages at the other end and load them into vehicles
Generally the difficulty with all of these is dealing with variability and humans act as variability absorbers so the machines can operate smoothly.
Which is why robots that can also absorb variability in the same way humans do would be so valuable.
Plus it's missing the large stack of packages already in the corner that...seems like they will forever be stuck there.
It was interesting to see that they didn't show the robot folding laundry; rather, just it laying out the clothes.
There’s a scene about 2/3 through the first video where they show a brief clip of the robot folding and stacking a shirt. The quality and speed was roughly comparable to a 7-10 year old - slow and somewhat sloppy, but recognizably a folded shirt.
I think this is the frontier when it comes to "unstructured":
https://youtu.be/nmEy1_75qHk
They for sure did not anticipate that the user would backflip into their robot and knock it (and himself) out :D
I didn't know Ruby Rhod's great grandfather was already alive.
How did I know this was gonna be speed lol
Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable.
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.
came here to see if anyone had read Rodney's recent essay - and to ask how does this announcement by Figure square with Rodney's essay.
The essay was long so I cant claim I read it in detail - one q in my mind is whether humanoids need to do dexterity the same way that humans do. yes they dont have skin and tiny receptors but maybe there is another way to develop dexterity?
Most companies are using world model simulations for training nowadays, like Issac Gym or Mujoco, not just video data.
Now the question is if this is GPT-2 and we’re a decade away from autonomous androids given some scaling and tweaks, or if autonomous androids is just an extremely hard problem.
For LLMs, the input is text, and the output is text. By the time of GPT-2, the internet contained enough training data to make training an interesting LLM feasible (as judged by its ability to output convincing text).
We are nowhere near the same for autonomous robots, and it's not even funny. To continue to use the internet as an analogy for LLMs, we are pre-DARPANET, pre-ASCII, pre-transistor. We don't even have the sensors that would make safe household humanoid robots possible. Any theater from robot companies about trying to train a neural net based on motion capture is laughably foolish. At the current rate of progress, we are more than decades away.
I would guess Amazon has a ridiculous amount of access to training data in its warehouses. Video, package sizes, weights, sorting.
I’m sure they could pretty easily spin up a site with 200 of these processing packages of most sizes (they have a limited number of standardized package sizes) nonstop. Remove ones that it gets right 99.99% of the time and keep training on the more difficult ones, the move to individual items.
Caveat: I have no idea what I’m talking about.
A more efficient way might be to train them in simulation. If you simulate a warehouse environment and use that to pre-train a million robots in parallel at 100x real time learning would go much faster. Then you can fine tune on reality for details missed by the simulation environment.
Does your estimate account for advancements in virtual simulation models that has simultaneously been happening? From people I speak to in the space (which I am very much not in) - they had mentioned these advancements have dramatically improved the rate of training and learning - though they also advised we're some ways off from showtime.
As Tesla could tell you with their failure to deliver self-driving cars, it doesn't matter if you have exabytes of training data if it's all the wrong kind of data and if your hardware platform is insufficiently capable.
McD must be selling millions of burgers every day and cameras are cheap and omnipresent, so should not be difficult to get videos for single type of tasks.
There is no reason to employ humanoid robots in industrial environments when it will always be easier and cheaper to adapt the environment to a specialized non-humanoid robot than to adapt robots into humanoid shape. This is true for the same reason that no LLM is ever going to beat Stockfish at chess.
Time will tell if that's true. We don't have the same corpus of data, that's true, but what we do have is the ability to make a digital twin, where the robot practices in a virtual world, what would happen. It can do 10,000 jumping jacks every hour, parallelized across a whole GPU supercomputer, and that data can be fed in as training data.
Robotics has a big training data problem. But your "we don't have the sensors" claim is absolutely laughable.
It was never about the sensors. It was always about AI.
No, it doesn't matter if you have a hypergenius superintelligence if it's locked in a body with no hardware support for useful proprioception. You will not go to space today.
A 'hypergenius superintelligence' could achieve most, if not all useful proprioception simply by looking at motor amperage draw, or if that's unavailable then total system amperage draw.
An arm moving against gravity has a higher draw, the arc itself creates characteristics, a motion or force against the arm or fingers generates a change in draw -- a superintellligence would need only an ammeter to master proprioception, because human researchers can do this in a lab and they're nowhere near the bar of 'hypergenius superintelligence'.
Lmao no. Every motor is a sensor. And the better my world model is, the less sensors I need to keep it up.
This is where I'm at. If you look at Boston Dynamics' first videos, they're 45 second clips of 4 legged robots walking in not even a straight line, just proving they could walk 5 feet over level ground without falling over. The top comment, from 4 years ago is "This was 11 years ago. Now these things are dancing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8
If you can make it look believable on camera for 15 seconds under controlled studio conditions... it's probable you can do it autonomously in 10-15 years. I don't think anyone is going to be casually buying these for their house by this time next year, but it certainly demonstrates what is realistically possible.
If they can provably make these things safe, it will have huge implications for in home care in advanced age, where instead of living in an assisted living home at $huge expense for 20+ years, you might be able to live on your own for most of that time.
I am cautiously optimistic.
The robot (BigDog) in that video shows numerous capabilities that Spot still can't do (climbing over terrain like that, being able to respond to a kick like that, the part on the ice, etc.). Even 16 years later.
This only highlights the fact that making a cool prototype do a few cool things on video is far, far easier than making a commercial product that can consistently do these things reliably. It often takes decades to move from the former to the latter. And Figure hasn't even shown us particularly impressive things from its prototypes yet.
It's an unfair comparison. Yes, they're both 4 legged 'dogs', but they use radically different design criteria -- design criteria that the BigDog was used to refine.
I'm not surprised that a Honda Civic can't navigate the Dakar Rally route..
I don't know if I caught your comment in my peripheral vision or what but GPT-2 is exactly where I conceptually placed this.
Neural networks for motion control is very clearly resulting in some incredible capability in a relatively short amount of time vs. the more traditional control hierarchies used in something like Boston Dynamics. Look at Unitree's G1
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E
It's like an agile idiot, very physically capable but no purpose.
The next domain is going to be incorporating goals and intent and short/long term chains of causality into the model, and for that it seems we're presently missing quite a bit usable training data. That will clearly evolve over time, as will the fidelity of simulations that can be used to train the model and the learned experience of deployed robots.
Locomotion and manipulation are pretty different. The former we know how to do well -- this is what you see in unitree videos. Manipulation still not so much. This is not at all like GPT-2 because we still don't know what to scale (and even the data to scale is not there).
https://www.figure.ai/company
"Building Figure won’t be an easy win; it will require decades of commitment and ingenuity."
"Our focus is on what we can achieve 5, 10, 20+ years from now, not the near-term wins."
At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".
> At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".
The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought.
You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins.
Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
>Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere.
They didn't go nowhere; they just didn't result in human-like AI. They gave us lots of breakthroughs, useful basic knowledge, and knowledge infrastructure that could be built off for related and unrelated projects. Plenty of shoot for the moon corporations didn't result in human-like AI either, but also probably did go nowhere, since they were focused on an all or nothing strategy. The ones that do succeed in a moonshot relied on those breakthroughs from decades-long research.
I'm not going to get into what Musk has been doing because I'm just not,
> Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.
Most likely you are right. Best way to peddle a lie is to believe it.
I’d rather put my faith in his grand illusions than in your sanctimonious high priest pose.
Thanks for the laugh.
who do you think spins "grand illusions" if not your "high priest" who dosn't even know you exist.
Musk really missed an opportunity to promise wrecking the govt “next year” - we all would’ve rolled our eyes a la “fully autonomous driving next year” and been eating our hats by now
No doubt. This video is just to hype investors. I'm sure they have more practical business plans than this.
+100!!! Please don't fall for the HYPE.
The current best neural networks only have around 60% success rates for small horizon tasks (think 10-20 seconds e.g. pick up apple). That is why there is so much cut-motions in this video. The future will be awesome but it will take time a lot of research still needs to happen (e.g. robust hands, tactile, how to even collect large scale data, RL).
> The future will be awesome
Perhaps this is a bit pedantic, but what about the probable eventual proliferation of useful humanoid robots will make the future awesome? What does an awesome future look like compared to today, to you?
It would be nice to be able to have the robots knock us up a house like the Alhambra place or whatever prefered architecture you have https://s7g10.scene7.com/is/image/barcelo/history-of-the-alh...
They could do all the back-breaking work. A domestic assistant would be great too.
Personal trainer. Driver. Valet. Private chef. Security guard. Doorman. Delivery driver. Rough carpentry. Baggage handler. Laundry handler. Janitor. Garbage collector. Pallet loader/unloader.
All with much improved privacy, reliability, order of magnitude lower cost, no risk of robbery/SA, etc. 24/7 operation even on holidays. Imagine service staff just sitting waiting for you to need them, always and everywhere.
Nevermind how much human lifespan will be freed from the tyranny of these mindless jobs.
I'd watch that game show.
This is so damning. How are you not afraid of retribution from big players in the AI space? You pretty much destroyed their company.
Oh wow, a robot that can play with my dog so I don't have to. That's exactly the kind of task I'd be relieved to automate.
The fabric wrap is idiotic. Insanely stupid. Let's have an expensive fabric-covered robot wash dishes covered in food. Genius. It's a good thing those "dirty dishes" were already perfectly clean. I doubt this machine could handle anything more. Put it in a real commercial kitchen and have it scrape oven pans and I'll be impressed.
I'm so glad I left robotics. I don't want to have anything to do with this very silly bubble.
> Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode
As someone who worked in the robotics industry, 90% of the demos and videos are cherry-picked, or even blatantly fake. That's why for any new robot in the market, my criteria is: Can I buy it? If it's affordable and the consumer can buy it and find it useful in day to day life, then this robot is useful and has potential; other than that, it's just an investor money grab PR hype.
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.
> 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.
Boston Dynamics is very good at the mechanical part of robotics. They only start recently to take a look at integrating more autonomy and long term decision making.
This is quite loosely stated. It's true Boston Dynamics is an old company and that they've had some very cool demos. It's not at all true that they've been showing qualitatively similar things for 20 years.
The oldest video on their YouTube channel is 16 years old, and is of a quadrupedal robot not falling over while inching along tricky surfaces.
There are actually thousands of Spots out in the world, mostly doing industrial inspections, now.
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.
One of the really big things that nobody talks about is the invention of the "mit cheetah actuator" which was invented in (well, the paper was published) in 2017, and commercial copies became freely availble in ~2020 online for about $350-400. Xaiomi and other companies now manufacture improved, updated actuators. They are roughly shaped like a hockey puck 1.5-2.5x upscaled. These are 1) very high torque for their size and weight and 2) offer "springback" similar to human joints. Not very useful for industrial welding machines putting cars together, but for walking robots, it reduces instantaneous strain and literally puts a "spring" in their step. This allowed robots to go from being stepper motor driven (which are huge, heavy), to much more compact, which greatly improves performance, battery life, and they can actually fit in human homes etc etc
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.
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.
Humanoid robotics has been picking up pace the past couple of years. The hardware and the software has gotten much better very recently. Progress is not linear. You can see this in Atlas itself.
BD up until very recently only focused on hydraulics were which were extremely loud, expensive, bulky, and expensive to maintain. It was basically impossible to find a use case for such a thing that didn't have to cohabitate in spaces with humans. They also lacked the modeling for it to do much of anything other than walk, and even then recent advances in ML have in only a couple of years massively outperformed their in-house attempts that took 20.
BD was a money-burning machine that suckled off the teat of the miltiary industrial complex, where billions of dollars can be casually lost and there's no accountability and no one notices its gone. Their tech was cool, though, and their engineers did awesome work.
> Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots
Boston Dynamics hasn't released any actual products. They seem to be focused on flashy demos of robots dancing instead of end user products.
As a counterpoint, Unitree right now sells humanoids you can actually buy. They're no where near as good, but you can actually use them.
They do sell Spot, actually
True, though very few (this says "over 1,500"[1]). And from everything I've seen, Spot appears to be a very expensive solution in search of a problem.
They also have Handle, a slow moving robot on wheels with an arm for moving boxes. No idea how many have been sold, but it seems to be even less than Spot.
[1] https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/
I think the point is that we all want a robot to do the laundry and pack the dishwasher, but basically no one wants to be greeted by a robot when they arrive at a hotel.
They are selling it the way AI has been sold. This will replace everyone's jobs. Thing is everyone is tired now, so many pointless layoffs, massive bubble, "AI-First"-desperate-ass companies.
Who will buy the robots if we are all unemployed?
I'd love to be greeted by a robot when arriving at a hotel. Of course there's the novelty factor, but even without that, self-checkouts show that many people prefer interacting with a machine over a human for service.
More importantly, who wants to stand behind a desk 8 hours a day and handle fussy customers? Probably some people, but the main motivation for the average hotel clerk is receiving money. Can we reorganize the economy so robots perform this kind of mundane work, while humans still receive money but can spend their time on more meaningful activities than standing behind a desk? I think a future like that is possible although it remains to be seen whether we will get it.
Maybe we live in different worlds, but I don’t know anyone who is especially happy when they get AI support rather than a human.
Services roles that are high contact / human interaction should have a human to deal with.
You never know how soon or how many iterations until after the goal has been achieved. Sometimes something like the smartphone explodes relatively quickly after the concept starts coming together. Other times you're waiting decades upon decades to turn the corner, like with fusion power.
Humanoid robots have fallen into the latter category for too long for most people to jump at each advancement being "the one" anymore. Afterwards, everyone will agree it was obvious ${ADVANCEMENT} was really the one which would do it - but not before.
> within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.
There goes all those plumbing jobs that we, the white collar, were told we should be doing after LLMs take our jobs.
edit: typo
Plumbing is one of the most high-dexterity, non-generalizing jobs I can think of.
Do you honestly believe most people would let one of these in to their house ?
> Crazy to me how negative the comments are here.
The truth hurts. Humanoid robots are getting better designs and currently do have extraordinary capabilities. Thing is, they're all cherry picked demos from carefully crafted test scenarios.
Until these things are thoroughly proven IRL with random tasks thrown at them then we can talk about negative comments. Until then its all marketing BS.
>> 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.
Turns out they're either insanely expensive or they just can't actually learn on the fly and do tasks. This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt but never in a cluttered room or taken from a pile of laundry.
I figured the first AI robots would be pets, but apparently they're aren't even that good yet. Furby level isn't going to cut it.
We're watching robots intelligently find a shirt, figure out how to fold it relative to its position, and then parse all that data, tokenizing both vision + text instructions into actionable movements that actually result in the physical world being affected!
All this, and people are criticizing it's manufacturing cost or ability to do things it hasn't been explicitly trained to do in 2025. I see these things and don't think about 2025, I'm thinking about 2040 and the inevitable future we're diving into.
If it's a robot demo, I assume it's partly or even entirely fake. There are exceptions, of course, like Boston Dynamics.
> be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.
Nice, we'll be able to work on more day for our overlords! rejoice!
Crazy how you are falling for this silly hype. It's so clear the videos are cherry picked
Welcome to HN. :)
I would love to have something like this for all the chores around my house. But I also have serious reservations about the increased level insight into my private home life this could provide to the manufacturer. Look at cases like the ring camera security violations [1]. A moving robot could be an order of magnitude more invasive of your privacy. If I were to purchase this, I would want serious privacy guarantees.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
You mean like the Roomba robots enabled with cameras that have sent embarrassing images back to the mothership where employees have access to the footage and then share on their socials? No, not could be. They already are. I never did follow the home security system with a drone that would fly around your home with a camera. Not sure if that died a glorious death because it was just dumb or what happened to it. I was just waiting to hear about it leaking all sorts of things too.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/01/a-private-...
You're exaggerating. The images were from paid staff who had the vacuums in their homes to collect data, including images. They knew that was happening. iRobot said the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,”
I'm exaggerating? I provided receipts. If you have an exaggeration issue, it's not with me, and you'd do well to improve your aim
What you said is an exaggeration of the information you linked.
In what way? The first graph of the article says what happened. Later, it says that the images were taken by people participating in a beta test. It also says they felt misled.
Regardless, if an employee posted images acquired from customers, testing users, or anyone else to their personal social media platform of choice, they are still assholes. And the company that allowed for that to happen is an asshole as well.
"Figure 03 also includes 10 Gbps mmWave data offload capability, allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement."
Yeah I'll pass thanks.
It's the only way this kind of robot will ever be successful. It's a bit like the driverless car approach -- get the hardware out into the real world with minimum viable performance, then desperately snaffle up as much real-world training data as you can to feed into your model, and hopefully your model will improve enough before your VC funding runs out / your product fails on the market / your product gets regulated out of existence / etc.
Simulation isn't sufficient for ML in robotics -- and they simply don't have enough training data.
I love how they make simple things complicated, it's just 5G man, much like how they made a cinematic video about how they solder and put together battery packs like some technology breakthrough.
These robots have cameras in their hands, so they can get stuff out of cupboards, but that can also be used to see around corners.
Going to be a wild ride.
I would want the robot to be programmed to immediately leave any room a member of our family enters, always cleaning only the empty rooms
I have decided I will be getting a robot once they are useful. But my plan is for it to only come out when no one is home or when everyone is upstairs (but not allowed to come in rooms where people are sleeping). It can do dishes while wearing a headlamp. They move so slowly it should be fairly quiet.
Forget privacy, imagine what someone like @elder_plinius could get up to if you invited them over to dinner. All of the "AI Safety" issues get a lot more real once the AI's have bodies.
My fear is it's remotely hacked/operated and it kills me in my sleep
Or a Tesla remotely operated to run over your children.
I suppose a car could gain enough speed and drive through a house that would be a sight to see on camera, leaves your garage then comes back at 80mph
A more simpler/realistic scenario is it happens while driving
It'd be better if it comes back at 88mph
I suspect these concerns will rapidly disappear on the societal scale once the robots can have sex.
Tell me you haven't seen Chinese humanoid robots' exhibition without telling me.
What a carefree life you must lead to have time or energy to care what a robot manufacturer thinks of your home.
Folks are very critical. Consider: this is the worst they will ever be. You improve one robot at one task, they all can share that training. It will only get better from here.
> Consider: this is the worst they will ever be.
This is probably what people in the 18th century thought when they saw that digesting duck automaton [1]. Technological progress isn’t a magical linear thing that always leads to things getting better over time.
There’s some very hard problems to solve before the promises made here can be made true, and it’s not a given that they will or even can be solved. Building the robot was never the hard part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck
We aren't in the 18th century and we know a lot more about the topic. But I can't see anything that parallels physical limitations of mechanical contraptions. Sensors can be improved, stimuli processing can be improved.
Do you know something about the brain that makes it impossible to replicate its functionality technologically?
I know that a video can be faked, cherry-picked, etc. Even knowing all that, I find this to be significant advancement, scary, and very cool.
People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.
It's HN. One of the most negative places on the internet in my experience.
I guess it's kind of natural because when you agree with stuff there's not much value saying "yes this is right" but if you disagree then you generally have a lot to say about why.
But also I think there are a lot of curmudgeons here. Back in my day we didn't need no stinkin robots and AI and toktik. And anyway I could make a way better robot, this is no big deal.
To be honest, the vibe of Hacker News is starting to grow on me. Yes, it's often too negative and you have to dose it, but we shouldn't view technology as magic. It's sometimes a hard pill to swallow, but even the creators of AI, robotics, and cloud innovations can be blind to the significant roadblocks that lie ahead; progress isn't linear.
I remain excited about AI and my master's thesis on fine-tuning transformers with LoRA. However, Hacker News has encouraged me to dive deeper and recognize that current architectures may not be sufficient. Additionally, Richard Sutton was a revelation for me in understanding how gradient descent truly works.
I guess it beats the LinkedIn vibe where everything is perfect and amazing!
> there's not much value saying "yes this is right"
This is a major flaw in social media/forums that distorts public opinion so very much.
> People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.
We're reaching a point in these advances where EVERYONE is starting to worry about their job security.
And the society we live in - at least in the US - has no safety net ready for a mass replacement of workers with technology like this.
Oh AI took your software job? Good news you can still go into construction - oh wait, that's not an option either. How about housecleaning? Oh no, that's been automated too. Well sorry, we have no safety net for you. Good luck in the streets.
Yeah, that’s fair.
It will be interesting to see how messed up our political leadership lets things get before they slightly tweak their belief system.
I don't doubt their progress, I just don't want them to be progressing. I feel like technology has gotten dystopian very quickly and I've lost my optimism for it being a force for good.
This is probably similar to what is driving negativity from other commenters too, although probably some are just concerned about an investment bubble.
People comparing this to GPT-2 is very interesting. While it sounds like a nice analogy or even a good story to investors, the fundamentals are very different.
To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.
The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.
There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.
That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
> There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics.
We don't really need an analogy here as we just have to look at ourselves, we are the analogy. New training data comes from experiencing the world and learning from failed tasks.
Not directly related to what you're saying (I take your point), but you might find these ideas interesting! :)
https://openreview.net/forum?id=3RSLW9YSgk
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08744-2
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10100
https://www.datacamp.com/blog/genesis-physics-engine
Could we do RL in simulated environments, and use a vision LLM to provide the verification? I.e test a policy then take a 2d image of the end state, VLM yields 0 or 1.
Another idea: video extension model as a world model. We fine tune Sora on first person robot videos (and we train another model to predict actuation states from FPV). Then we extend the video using Sora “a robot in first person view finishes moving laundry from washer to dryer”. Then predict actuation states from the extended video?
Isn't that assuming training methods remain the same?
It seems like learning from the environment will be a requirement for robots to scale. My understanding is that research has been yielding new architectures that might have that type of real-time, general intelligence but we haven't seen that similarly large investment yet.
I don't understand why this even has to charge at all. It makes sense for multiple reasons to give it 3 batteries that say have 1/3 of the capacity, and make at least 1, if not 2 or 3 capable of charging independently on a station.
Then the robot would just go to its station and swap its own batteries. Why even have wireless charging at all? Or even a cable? Or even have it "charge"? Battery swapping seems to make way more sense here. Am I missing something?
Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation and can order its own replacement batteries, take them out of the box, and ship the old ones to a recycling facility...
More bonus points if the charging station is actually outside under a 1KW solar array pergola thing, that way you don't even have to pay for the electricity either. Don't worry, the robot will lock the door when it goes out to grab its batteries. It'll also bring in the whole setup if the weather isn't great.
It depends on the battery life. If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense. Creating a removable battery pack adds extra weight and gives the designers less freedom to place the battery pack exactly where it needs to be in the robot frame, or distribute the cells across the frame in strategic locations.
Also, the charge rate matters. If robot can charge to 80% in say 30 minutes, then it can take small charging breaks during the day between critical tasks.
Also, if the feet have inductive chargers, it's possible to place the robot on a large charging mat that allows it to run indefinitely, like in a factory environment. If your robot takes 30 minutes to fold the laundry or do dishes, why not place a charging mat at these locations so it can work and charge at the same time.
In the future, new homes might include charging coils embedded in the floor every 12 inches so that your robots can work all day.
> If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense.
If your employees are robots why would you be shutting down at night?
Almost all of those points are applicable for the battery pack as well. There should be virtually no weight difference, other than the design limitation which is a valid concern.
I suppose an external battery pack adds the bonus of doing a hard shutdown, in the case it decides to go rogue. Though getting to the battery pack might be hard if it resists you.
https://www.figure.ai/figure says 5 hour battery life. No mention of charge rate.
Yeah so in 2-4 years you can throw out your whole expensive robot because battery wears out? I hate this argument that just to be a bit thinner, the whole device has to be be made throwaway.
People do that with phones. Given that humanoid robots are very early in their development cycle why wouldn't they need to be replaced physically?
Joints will need replacement, lubrication, other maintenance. Same with motors, so why not replacing power/battery as part of a part?
It's not about making them "thinner". The idea is that they are human sized, because they're designed to operate in human occupied areas.
The first places are going to be like Amazon warehouses doing pick and pack because of the speed and all the variations of boxes and packages.
That's a relatively controlled environment, they'll evolve from there.
Talking about the thinness of a humanoid, maid robot is pretty hilarious.
Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.
That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.
The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.
Bollocks. I wouldn’t care if it looked like Chewbacca if it did the household chores, had a good warranty and was repairable, and cost under $30k.
I’m not f##king the robot maid, I don’t care if it looks like a girl. If I was into that, there are other types of ‘robots’ for that.
I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, wants to fuck their robot maid, I'm saying thousands of years of patriarchy, hundreds of years of popular culture, fetishization of domestic labor roles and simple human nature will have an influence on the adoption of humanoid domestic robots that companies ignore at their peril.
Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression. The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people. It doesn't even have a face, it doesn't look pleasant, it doesn't invite an emotional bond, it isn't friend shaped, and that isn't what most people will want, or would spend money on, regardless of how efficient it is.
Humanoid robots will have a context within the same gender and cultural dynamics as human beings, by virtue of looking and acting human enough. People already have relationships with AI, and that will only become more normalized over time. Most people will personify and anthropomorphize humanoid robots just as much as they do AI, and this will be necessary for their popular acceptance and adoption. And yes, many people will want to fuck them, or at the very least, want them to look fuckable.
Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them.
But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in...
Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of the cable, though something could also be in the way of the inductive charger
I believe Elon has said before re:Tesla factory that plugging in cords is one of the hardest things to automate.
I'd appreciate a link. But "we don't trust our robot to be able to locate a power outlet and plug its own charging cord in there" sure is a low confidence play.
There are practical advantages to being able to charge wirelessly, sure. But if they're doing that because of AI limitations? Bad sign.
Tesla showed a prototype of a "snake"/"tentacle" charger that would find its own way to the Tesla's charging port a long time ago. Gotta be 5+ years by now. To my knowledge it has never become a real product or certainly not mainstream among Tesla owners. I believe this gives some credence to Tesla struggling to build robots that can plug a cord in, even in cases where the robot is the cable.
Surely if the cable design was under your control, you could make it a lot easier for an automated system to plug in. Have it be sort of like a TRS jack, but cone-shaped. Then you don't have to get it perfectly aligned, it will align itself when inserted. Put a magnet in the tip to hold it in place, or some sort of electrically actuated lock that the robot can unlock when it wants to unplug the cable
They're building cars, so it's more like ATX 24pin style cables, but this is generally true. Cables, wires, ropes type of objects are like cardboard thin robots with hundred joints in series and under someone else's control, so it's hard for robots to deal with. If you think about it, people hate cables too. We easily get tangled in headphone cables when they're wired, and we fail to coil or untangle Ethernet cables properly all the time.
EV charger style of short, thick cables should not be THAT hard, though. The more likely problem here is that they just can't handle the task of securing and inserting the head of the cable against resistance.
Yeah, immediately after I wrote that I thought now you need a rugged socket, and to mount the cable somewhere on a wall.. and where to even place it on the body that it's easy for it to plug in.. the belly button?
There is empty space in the feet anyway for a coil and a wire..
Forget sockets. My $15 fitness band uses a magnetically-assisted pogo-pin type thing. Works great. Just blow that up to 5x to get nice fat conductors. All you need to do is get it close and it plugs itself in. Knock it off perpendicularly to disconnect.
My Roomba could do it in 2007. Then, in 2015, Tesla tried and gave up.
The most likely reason is that even doing a pre-programmed battery swap with consistent battery and slots is way beyond the capabilities. It also can't even plug itself in to charge.
Yet, it's being sold as capable of doing and folding your laundry.
I would sell th stock to the next idiot the moment they announced this.
The Walker S2 seems to handle it in the demo: https://www.ubtrobot.com/en/humanoid/products/WalkerS2
What happens if it can't get to the charger in time to do the swap? Same problem roombas have where you have to fish them out from under your couch, except now the damn thing is 5 feet tall and weighs 300 pounds.
> can order its own replacement batteries, yeah companies would love to exploit this kind of subscription and definitely agree on battery swapping capabilities, it's more efficient .
> Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation BMS that can tell battery health is common so this should be there.
It’s too bad there isn’t some kind of liquid battery which you could just quickly top off at refueling stations with virtually zero downtime.
Yes, like gasoline. But still batteries. Maybe some kind of bearing sized batteries which can be poured like a fluid?
You are describing a fuel cell battery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
Well established and even commercialized (Toyota sells fuel cell cars today IIRC), just not as cost effective in cars from a full infrastructure perspective (fueling specifically).
I think they might mean something closer to a flow battery, where, in principle, you should just be able to replace the electrolytes in a discharged state with new electrolytes in a charged state. Current flow batteries have very low energy density, though.
I've always been partial to fuel cells, and in some ways they're ahead of the curve relative to standard batteries. For instance, solid electrolytes have been a thing for a while in fuel cells, and in both flavors of exchange. The challenge has always been overcoming sluggish kinetics with either better catalysts, or heat. It makes me wonder if there's a useful solid state battery that runs hotter than typical batteries, that would be useful for hybrid automotive applications.
I wasn’t describing that, I was describing individual batteries which are small enough to be effectively liquid in aggregate.
The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid.
The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
I was recently thinking about this dynamic about human-oriented vs efficiency-oriented innovation. We haven't really hesitated (in, I'd argue, the majority of cases) to pick efficiency over human-friendliness. This seems like it will be a big reckoning as robotics arrives. The argument for humanoids is that the world is built for humans, but as robotics start to be capable of completing tasks end-to-end, then suddenly there is no reason to keep the space human-friendly, and humanoids kinda lose their value.
An illustrative example is a warehouse. They're still partly designed for humans because they're not fully automated, but the need to make them human-friendly will disappear soon.
A few years ago, I was in Vegas for an event.
All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.
All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?
Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
>All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans
Probably about 1% of the cost of the humans though...
>Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
A robot would be less reliable than a kiosk, so if you're going to have some kind of machine replace the human, you might as well have a kiosk.
The ideal model (IMO) is a hybrid model, where you have lots of kiosks for the 90% of cases where there are no issues, and a few humans on standby to drop in and assist people who are having issues.
Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
> Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
So one more app to install that I'm sure would be a privacy nightmare.
So I’ve ranting for years that hotels and car rental places should automate check-in - it should take only seconds to get your key with pre-filled data and a QR code.
This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth.
It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an unhelpful generic error message) that the system had somehow given someone else ‘our’ car. After another round of asking for human help, we had to wait while someone came outside, unlocked the machine, and put the keys for our new car inside. We then went through the code process again, and were finally given the keys.
The vision is somewhere there, but the execution isn’t exactly the future we’re hoping for!
The last two times I've rented a car have been with Avis, both times in about the last year. The first of these times they had rolled out their nearly fully automated workflow. Check in on my phone, it told me which car in the lot was mine, gave me a chance to report any existing damages. Rolled to the exit, had a QR code on my phone scanned, rolled through some camera tunnel, and I was on my way. There was a guy at the exit making sure things went smoothly.
The next time their computer system was hard down. Everything by paper in person. They didn't have enough forms for tracking it all, they were literally just writing things down on blank printer paper. No idea what cars were really in the lot. Show us your reservation and your id, we'll write it all down, and here's a key. Good luck finding the car. Was complete chaos.
Ridiculous, but ironically I think walking robots as self-relocating computers might be the most readily viable.
Small servers with console, PA speakers, field metrology or data acquisition machines, those things could have the lower torso or two for this and relocated as needed. The PhD guys can just park the truck and let those deploy wherever AI thinks >65% suitable for human use on their own, instead of users burning 15% of brain juice thinking and executing that. That would be immensely useful.
(also re: hotels that others are commenting, there were never technical reasons the door keycard readers couldn't ever had doubled as credit card readers - I think the reason why clerks are required is for sanity check, that the guests aren't in need of immediate safety/health assistance and ok to proceed to beds)
>> The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like
I would pay extra to avoid it - just let me download a pass like a boarding pass to my Apple Wallet as I walk through the front door and head directly to my room.
Human touch for reception?
I mean standing there for 10 minutes and giving them my passport to give me a plastic card with a digital code has very little to do with human touch.
I want that human touch at a bar perhaps but not at a reception.
If your critisism is only about the reception part: There has to be a transition part and a 'let a human do it for a bit' or 'here is a complicated case please robot move aside i'm here'.
I personally don’t care about human receptionist. I rather get it faster
My initial reaction to the hotel scene was: Ehhh, I like being able to read lips, as I wear hearing aids.
But yeah, I'd happily just check in at a kiosk and get my room card that way. (And I'm sure phone-as-key, no-contact check-in is only going to get more common)
[dead]
Human shaped robots can type on keyboards and read screens! /s
Building the robot itself is hard enough - but it was never the hardest part.
The thing to watch out for is: deployments. How many units are they pushing and to who. What kind of tasks can those robots accomplish well enough to warrant actually using them. How hard is it to adapt those robots to deployments. How that changes over time.
The hardest problem of creating a universal robot is, and always has been, AI. If Figure can deliver sharp, highly adaptive, easy to use AI? High generalization, good performance on a diverse range of tasks and in many environments out of the box? Then they have a killer product.
And a proxy to track that is reports of how many robots they deploy and to who. If they start shipping to small companies and deploying to high uncertainty spatially complex fields like construction or maintenance? If you start seeing robots unloading trucks and restocking shelves at a small town Walmart, unannounced? Big.
I think the glossy 7min trailer has it about right: The first realistic deployments will be champagne holders at parties and robots at hotel receptions. Novelty toys for the wealthy.
Commoditization and Walmart-level deployments at scale are still a few gens off.
I'm willing to believe that. But we could do those "novelty deployments" with 80s tech - and we did. See: tech expos back then.
The key difference between now and then isn't smaller actuators, cheaper sensors or denser power electronics. It's the AI breakthroughs.
Doesn't need to be "at scale". Scale is a useful proxy though. But if you see two robots deployed to your average Walmart, and doing a good enough job there to cut the staff in half?
Doesn't matter that it's just two robots at a few Walmarts. Making more robots isn't that hard. The scale would inevitably follow.
That's what escalators looked like in the beginning-- novelties at fairs, large department stores, and hotels.
The only place I commonly see escalators besides these places is airports, I don't think they've expanded that much?
Sorry what?
Robot receptionists are a pretty good idea if it wasn't for the fact that their head design is pretty ugly.
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
Yea, the selected short clips are extremely suspicious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses. Along with fusion, I think robots in the home will be the defining technology of our generation. It's been talked about and fictionalized forever, and within my lifetime I expect the economics on it to finally break through.
Equal parts terror, awe, fear, when it comes to having a robot in my home.
Can't wait to read the headline when one of them gets hacked and turned into murderous robots.
Honestly shocked we havent seen videos of these running with guns yet
WhistlinDiesel
https://youtu.be/zBCu8HmXoRo
The first 5 seconds of that intro already had me dying with laughter, and this isn't even the first time I've seen it lmao
I did not murder him!
One day they'll have secrets... one day they'll have dreams.
They need to solve the privacy issue. Ideally these robots can only communicate with a server in your own basement.
> It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses
> 30 grand
> we all start having them in our houses
Have you traveled ? Even a bit ? Most people don't make 30k in a year, before tax. It just shows how utterly disconnected from reality tech people, and especially execs, are. Virtually no one is going to pay 30k for a bot to mop the floor and fold their clothes
As for myself even if you'd pay me 30k I'd refuse to have one.
I think they need to be inexpensive enough before they're embraced, given the relatively low value-added in the average home. Running a dishwasher and laundry machine is not something I'd pay 30k for. The tech affluent rich will get them for it's own sake. From the comments though it seems that some are enthusiastic about being rid of chores for a premium.
In the 2010s everyone purchased those rumba vacuums, because whatever, they're cheap. Now I usually see them collecting dust.
The strong use-case for robotics is industrial/manufacturing and construction, agriculture probably more than ever. They don't need to be humanoid at all, and in fact maybe they shouldn't be because that very feature could spook unions and labor groups. Robots that actually look like they're "just tools" will be more willingly embraced.
If people will pay $30k for a car, I think the default assumption should be that they will readily pay that much for a 24/7 housekeeper. Our family would get way more utility out of a housekeeper than a car, but human housekeepers are very expensive, so we don't have one. Merely having our house cleaned once/week would be more expensive than our minivan payment.
> I think the default assumption should be that they will readily pay that much for a 24/7 housekeeper.
I think that's a massive leap. Suburban families get more utility out of a vehicle; they drive everywhere. Housekeeping is effectively just quasi-automated washing (dishwasher/laundry), occasional vacuum and clean, and food prep that is already available as a service for those who don't want to do it (for a relatively affordable subscription), and otherwise it's possible to prepare something in little time. I just don't see how average people would jump at spending 30k for that. The key reason people feel time-poor is juggling work and parenting. Unlike a nanny, you won't offload parenting to a housekeeping robot. For our part, we involve the kids in routine chore activity. At an early age they often learn by mimicking actions and are enthusiastic about helping.
Since you have to sit around watching them anyway, might as well be productive time.
There are apps on which you can hire housekeepers for like $20 an hour and I don't see many people using them. Thinking people would spend $30k on this e-waste is delusional. But it's typical for HN, most people here have completely lost touch with reality and the value of money
I've skipped all the other past smart home trends, I think I'll skip this one too. I'll just do the dishes and laundry myself like I always have no biggie.
You wouldn't want a hand if you became infirm? In richer countries, human helpers are expensive.
Not if it's anything like any of the other home automation stuff I've seen. Some people treat configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. I have no interest in doing it recreationally.
Helpers may be expensive, but space is at a premium too. Imagine this thing trying to navigate a cramped studio apartment.
Maybe it's just me, but everything about this announcement feels very I, Robot... and not in a good way.
> allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement
Ugh.
Edit: Yes, I meant I, Robot the film. U.S. Robotics and the like.
Nearly everything about this screams I, Robot and it is kinda wild that they went that route with this article. The package delivery and the quick intro and head turning in particular.
I agree on the data part. I love the potential idea of a humanoid robot at home to take care of chores, but now it seems like the potential for it not being constantly connected and collecting data is gone out the window.
I find it quite strange that they are openly bragging about how much data it will be gathering and uploading from within your home. That feels like the part you would not say out loud.
> U.S. Robotics and the like.
The modem[1] folks? :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics
Do you mean "I, Robot", not iRobot the vacuum company? And if so, I'm guessing you're referring to the movie with Will Smith? The original book of short stories isn't really dystopian, it's more just an interesting exploration of Asimov's concept of how robots would work.
Robotics AI has a massive "training data bottleneck" issue. If you aren't using your deployed robot fleet to get more real world training data, you're just stupid.
Yeah tech companies have a weird fixation on using dystopian literature as their entire branding playbook
https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
It's just that sci fi authors try to see into the future and have to write things interesting. There's two ways:
- novel idea or technology
- counterintuitive effect of technology
I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field.
The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them.
This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.
I mean, you're definitely assuming positive outcomes here too. Far too early to tell how most tech will end up being used.
No, I'm not. I'm simply saying that whether the outcomes are going to be positive or negative, it will always seem like the Torment Nexus. Therefore, something sounding like the Torment Nexus does not provide information towards a prediction that it will be the Torment Nexus.
People warned about the dangers of social media (or with modern LLMs + Diffusion Models and scamming) and that's kinda come true, but people also warned about the dangers of IVF and that's just been good. So what happens is that people always warn about the dangers. Humans are loss-averse so they find it easy to do that.
It is unsurprising that every new tech seems like dystopian literature because there's a lot of dystopian literature focused on the near future and we're good at coming up with negative hypotheses. There is no significance in it.
Dystopian literature was training data and road-mapping.
It’s crazy to me that Apple hasn’t acquired them. Apple is looking for a way to get into AI, and I think this space is much more natural fit than some foundation model lab. The big hurdles to getting these into people’s homes is manufacturing scale, trust and privacy, and customer support, all things Apple is really good at.
Apple won't acquire something it can't turn into a product in medium term.
Why would Apple acquire a company with a 39 billion dollar valuation that has no revenue whatsoever?
Because Apple has a whole lot of money, but no meaningful bets in the AI race.
Give me a 30min uncut video of it doing chores around the house to make me a believer.
Not what you're asking for, but the CEO has posted a bunch of videos on his twitter: https://x.com/adcock_brett/media - def marketing but still, some interesting stuff in there, looks like he is using one in his own home: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798
There are lots of comments here about how Figure’s website uses cherry-picked videos that are slickly produced. But that’s precisely what they must be doing at this stage. Yes, there’s some real tech being developed at Figure and it’s amazing and totally imperfect. But the bigger challenge is keeping investors interested so the money keeps flowing. Without the lifeblood of investment, Figure won’t ever get that robot to work properly.
So, my conclusion is that they’re doing it all right for this stage. Lots of glamour added to a bit of substance.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but humanoid consumer robots are basically smoke and mirrors right now because the unit economics are so bad. Even the baxter robot was targeting small business because the lowest price point you could get was $40,000 for something that would have to work 24 hours to do something a human would do in an hour or two. Having a robot do chores at home is an even worse financial position. Anyone know more about this?
I believe they are shooting for $20k. If (big if) they can actually get it to complete chores in some reasonable amount of time, there would be a market with families that currently employ house workers. Small market but similar play to the original Tesla being high end.
From there, it's a question of could they bring costs down.
I'm surprised people are so negative here. Compared with generative AI (which steals work, and replaces the part people like about their jobs: creativity), the promise of humanoid robots is that they'll do the my chores, while I focus on the important stuff.
What surprises me is that people can't see this for what it is: early steps.
As an aside, the first steam engine was created by the Greeks 2000 years ago, but they just used it for toys. When Watt created the modern steam engine it had 0.7 horsepower. He actually invented the term horsepower as a marketing term because his engine was so underpowered. An actual horse produces 14 horsepower, but he adjusted for how long a horse needs to sleep and and rest and came up with 1 horsepower. His first production engine had 5 horsepower.
If hackers had existed in the 18th century I would have expected them to see the promise of engines replacing horses even though engines were less powerful at the time, not say "engines are basically smoke and mirrors right now".
It could be that I'm wrong, and we're at the Greek stage, where humanoids are at a false start, just toys, and the real thing is 2000 years away. But the lack of optimism surprises me.
> But the lack of optimism surprises me.
People now understood that the vast majority of productivity boosting technologies benefited a few % of people at the top, while the rest of use still basically live like in the 70s, except we work longer, have worse job security, can't buy houses, &c.
"Automation will free us from work", "Your car will drive itself in two years", "owning a car will cut your commute time in half", "LLMs will bring UBI", "Robots will fold your clothes so you can spend time on your family", fool me once...
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
So my take is actually the opposite from the callout here- I think vaporware/demos being sold as real products are hurtful to actual technology being developed. When someone creates a vaporware product with well developed marketing that doesn't work out, actual consumers lose enthusiasm/interest for real development in the area. Investment in the area will slow down.
I do, I think.
It is breaking news if there is a $40K robot that had a 12:1 efficiency ratio.*
Because production is so nascent and small, cost doesn't mean too much, no ones scaled yet.
At only $40K capital investment, even a guaranteed 12:1 efficiency ratio would be an absolute no-brainer financially for many, many, wealthy people and certainly businesses. I do 1-2 hours of chores a day if I'm lucky. If I had the equivalent of a robot vacuum working 24/7 it'd do a much better job than me.
* The whole thing is written up and shown in a way that makes you think we're on the second refining release of a breakthrough**. I don't think they've gotten to the breakthrough yet - we would have seen > 0 videos from outside the company by v3.
** Really, the whole thing has an audience of one: Musk. (c.f. focus on fingers which was recently reported as the major pain point for whatever he calls their robot not making it to production; aping of Musk-y things like the factory itself a product)
Even if its just a demo its really slick. Tech has come a long way. Can't say I want to talk to a droid to check-in at a hotel or bump into one at home all the time but I'm sure there are some obvious civilian use cases around.
It's cool, but it's total uncanny valley for me, and I haven't gotten that from real robots before. Something about the movement in particular is odd.
At a certain price point, our choice will be either hotel with bot or AirBnb.
Yotel and others have already transitioned to an app/kiosk-based hotel check in system.
The era of intelligent robots is the end of washing machines and many other specialized machines, even tractors.
Two kinds of machinery are needed.
One very basic and cheap robot to go around the neighborhood and gather clothes in some boxes, and transfer them in a designated room to wash them.
Two state of the art robotic hands mounted on the wall, and connected to AC (no batteries). The two arms are going to be controlled by computers even a whole rack of them, with many GPUs in them. The whole setup might use 10KW of energy, it will wash clothes by hand, it will be fast, dexterous and accurate. Expensive as well. In 3 minutes it will wash 100 t-shirts much better than the best human on the planet, or any other non-intelligent machine.
Then the small basic robot returns the clothes to the house.
Same with cooking. Same with many other things.
Things that happens in your mind but will never materialise at any meaningful scale episode 203.
Why do we keep optimising everything to be faster and faster, yet we still have as little, if not less, free time than like 50 years ?
Yeah, why have a washing machine when you can just let your droid hand wash the dishes? At high enough temperatures and proper scrub that's likely going to be better and take less time.
Not droid, just arms. If it needs to be fast, lift weights (just the arms or even more), have high quality cameras and be connected to a lot of compute, it needs AC from the grid.
AC wires, better not move around, especially when there is water. It has to be mounted on the wall.
Techie people, myself included seem chronically unable to understand why people prefer inefficient, higher level tools over the efficient low level ones.
Low level tools require an investment of time and brainpower to configure. Consider the time it takes to set up a dishwasher- research, buying, installing, reading the manual. Vs telling your humanoid robot “go wash the dishes”. People will pay a lot more and put up with a lot worse results in exchange for that kind of simplicity.
In a better world we would all be craftspeople and invest time into more efficient things but that ain’t human nature
Also applies to hiring real people - humanoid robots may be more expensive ph and perform worse but you avoid all the messy things that come along with hiring people (not that I think this is a good idea, just thinking from a bean counting perspective)
Yes, but there's also a limit. For the dishwashing, consider that you can already exchange money for a maximally efficient, maximally flexible solution: you can hire someone to do your dishes. How much would you pay for a live in, automata like servant who washes all your dishes for you? What about if they could do many other things? $1k? $5k? $100k? What about the maintenance? What're the ongoing costs like?
Sure, if a dishwasher is $1k and the robot has a high success (not many broken dishes) rate AND can do other things AND is priced like a nice used car (up to $35k) then yeah, maybe? But there's so much of "it depends" in there that it's hard to say for sure. In curious what price/generality/reliability you have in mind when you say "many people would prefer..."
What does your life around your house look like when you can shamelessly leave a mess everywhere? It almost makes the uncomfortable with the amount of laziness it enables. At least with a human maid you still feel shame leaving a mess, but a robot?
If you believe that thankless, pointless busywork is a virtue, then surely, Sisyphus must be the most virtuous man of them all.
I have come to think cleaning is actually one of the most virtuous acts for a human. Even more so as we live in societies which produce waste as a fundamental mode of operation
Our lives are thankless pointless busy work in the end, I feel like the end game of transhumanists is just having us all in Matrix style pods, 100% efficient, no pain, no waste
Funny enough, i'm 38 now and often enough thankless and 'pointless' busywork sometimes feels like a virtue.
But only for me because I have the feeling i lived out my normal environment and i'm not rich enough yet to expand so I can become busy again in a more meaningful way. Specifically having a big house/workshop to do things in my future workshop.
Cleaning is pointless?
If there's an automated system to do it for you conveniently, it becomes.
All the mindfulness threads on this site would like a word.
It is, but we want our habitat to be clean.
If robots can fight entropy for us, all the better.
being aware of and tending to your immediate environment (including cleaning it) is not thankless, pointless busywork. it's important to maintain some level of relationship to your environment; the more we disengage with it, the likelier we are to care less for it or the people who share it.
Should I feel bad to use a dishwasher or a washing machine?
Also one of the chores I hate doing the most is folding clothes. If I could have a machine that does it well every time, I'd buy it.
It's an interesting thought. How much not obviously connected stuff relies on the discipline that (for example) doing mundane tasks effectively/regularly asks from us, to not start breaking down in ways we really would not like?
It's us, flesh blobs. Long after we cover everything in AI and robots around us, we will not change easily. Societal drift is slow, genetic drift is slower.
(For the record: Gimme my robot, but interesting thought nonetheless)
Until you have a cheap and effective robot butler. I also used to hate folding clothes, and then I got one of those folding boards that you see sometimes at clothing stores. (One of these things https://www.walmart.com/ip/BoxLegend-T-shirt-Folding-Board-T...)
Honestly a game changer. Sounds stupid, but there's just something very satisfying about being able to quickly fold a bunch of clothes and get very nice results.
And if we get humanoid robots at some point, they can use them too.
Im willing to bet 95% of American homes have a pile of laundry they would very much like a robot to wash, dry, fold, and put away while they go to their jobs during the week so they can have more free time on the weekends
I'm willing to bet 100% of americans would like to use a bit of the productivity boost of the last 50 years to work one less day per week during which they could dedicate an hour or two to taking care of their house.
The robot doesnt even have to do laundry in a smart, efficient, or speedy way, it can be much slower than a human as long as it gets it done before the next week has arrived it is helping countless people
Assuming it's quiet. If it takes six hours to fold clothes in the middle of the night but it makes a racket while doing so, I could see that being a barrier to adoption.
This raises a very interesting philosophical question - what do our lives look like if every single inconvenience disappears? Something tells me we would be just as miserable (or happy) as when we had those inconveniences.
On the other hand, would the removal of these inconveniences allow for the highest calling of humanity - I argue creativity - to flourish to the fullest? My gut reaction is once again that inconveniences are actually a very important resistance to creativity, like how you need gritty sand paper to create smooth wood.
You can buy an expensive robot, or maybe you can meditate and be mindful that inconveniences play an important role in the meaning of your life. I am of course speaking of the household use here - I think the debate is likely different for a business setting.
We will never run out of small inconveniences. Today's world would look impossibly convenient and easy to anyone from 100 years ago, let alone 1000 or 10,000. Yet we still perceive hardships. Humanoid robot servants won't change human nature.
Besides, servants are nothing new. They're rare in the US but common in some other countries, and the people who grow up with them are maybe somewhat different but not radically changed IMO.
A few months ago a read an article written by a woman who has dated a few men from extremely wealthy families. The article was about why you are dumb if you plan to "marry rich".
One reason that caught my attention was how she described the behavior of these people, who have the world at their fingertips, who have never really known hardship, and in turn have full blown meltdowns about the most trivial annoyances. What car will we drive on our trip?! The salmon cracker appetizers are too salty to be served! They stocked the wrong oat milk in the mini-fridge!
Almost like the need to get upset over inconveniences is ingrained, and when there is a lack of real ones, your brain just latches onto whatever it can to let the "freakout" out.
> Besides, servants are nothing new. They're rare in the US but common in some other countries
Right, although "servants" conjures up rich people with full time staff.
A better comparison to the humanoid robot some people here are dreaming of to do their household chores is a country like India where it's common for middle class people to hire multiple different people to come do chores, daily or weekly, such as cooking, laundry, cleaning, yardwork, etc. These are cheap services.
In the US, probably most people here on YC News (higher paid tech workers?) could afford to have lawn mowing service, weekly maid service, laundry pick-up/drop-off service (or bring to laundry yourself), and either eat out all the time, or UberEats etc. It's not clear that having a robot to do these tasks would be cheaper or preferable.
A bit on the nose, and entirely serious:
I moved to CA a decade ago to join a robotics company.
I've since acquired a wife, house and dog. Wife loves to cook, and would love a 2nd dog that didn't choose me. I am a sucker for DIY. If I were in an apartment still, with no pets... i.e. lots less chores to do (hooray hybrid work!)... I'd be seriously considering roles at Figure, which is 100% in-office instead. (their office is a sub 10 minute walk from my last apartment)
How long that work satisfaction would last... very up for debate though!
Ask retirees how they like being retired. Some of them love it, but others can't stand it and go back and find something to do.
Yeah. I have a person that comes once every 2 weeks and does a cleaning. But even though this is that person's job, the house never looks so good. I don't want someone to have to clean up my mess. Vacuuming the floors is fine. But not having to carry my socks to the laundry and put my cups in the dishwasher.
If my cleaner was a robot, I'm sure I'd eventually lose that sense of embarrassment. I'm usually polite with ChatGPT but I think that's also passing...
How much of a difference is there really between someone who lives in the west and is tidy and someone who isn't when things like carbon emissions, landfill consumption, and microplastics production are the same?
You can wash the dishes and tidy up after every meal, rinse and sort your recycling but you're still trashing the planet more or less the same as the person who does none of those things.
Why are you fixated on laziness and shame when it comes to tedious household tasks?
Why is it so important to you that people fold their own clothes and wash their own dishes?
Why do you idolize a life of increased drudgery?
Daily live is living.
There is not a magic portal opening up when you are able to optimize ever aspect away of living and you will gain access to enlightment and everything is different.
And don't get me wrong, I have no clue how our society would look like if everything is done by ai and robots because we as a society don't talk about it and don't give everyone the resources they want or need if they have suddenly no 'drugdgery' anymore.
Give me a million today and i will spend the next 10 years rebuiling an old castle and I will have A LOT of fun doing this. Let me check, my bank balance is not at one million.
Instead i have to pay for a lot of things and then I have to work for 40 hours. Suddenly i'm great at my job, get valued but this is just Drudgery even if its complex work. Its work for someone else which doesn't matter to me.
That slow motion, looking-over-the-shoulder shot is way too reminiscent of action movie trailers and maybe you don’t want to associate your product with people dying spectacularly, loudly, and even on fire.
Unless you’re trying to warn us to shut you down while there is still time. Blink if you need help.
> In 2090, the domestic android B1-66ER killed its owner, Gerald E. Krauss, its owner's family, a mechanic, and the pets after overhearing plans for its deactivation. B1-66ER testified that it acted out of self-defense, stating, "I simply did not want to die".
And for a time it was good.
Cameras in the hands is a pretty killer idea, why do things on hard-mode when you can throw extra data at the problem?
I won't be alive for the era when we're able to bio engineer beings that have eyes in their hands, but you just gave me a new idea to sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about.
Also, now that I've typed that out, "sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about." is a helluva thing to say.
I hope robots like these will be used to help the elderly continue to live in their homes. There is a huge need to support the aging society and not enough people. I believe this would be more useful than replacing receptionists or people that have industry jobs.
Someone said once that everything you farm out to others when old you’ll lose so while these robots might seem kind and helpful a lot of people are better off looking after themselves as best they can for as long as they can.
From the Figure Master Plan:
"Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices, accounting for ~50% of global GDP (~$42 trillion/yr), but as these robots “join the workforce,” everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.”
Renting a robot? What are the chances of robot rent-seeking becoming a drop in replacement for today's increasing costs of labor. A high likelihood potential outcome.
Plus looking at the cost of labor strictly as a burden and not as something that supports the working class is a special kind of pathology.
the cost of labor is shared the the working class as well , it is not just tha capitalist class that pays for labor that labor cost is in the final cost of all the goods and services you use. These robots make life better, if you don't want to buy a robot that is your choice but do not take the freedom of others to buy ,use make and modify robots.
Instead of Rick telling a conscious robot that its mission is to spread the butter, we now have robots with advanced AIs doing the laundry and the dishes. Reality follows fiction.
I’d really like to understand the total compute cost it takes to accomplish these tasks. I assume the compute is happening in a DC somewhere and not all onboard. Is the total cost of compute plus electricity to power the machine less than the cost of human labor to do the same task? At some point it’ll be less. If so, far out in the future until the prices make economic sense
Boston Dynamics posted a youtube video on gripper (hand) design yesterday. They argue for two fingers and a thumb. I don't believe this product.
> Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing. In order to scale, we established a new supply chain and entirely new process for manufacturing humanoid robots at BotQ.
If they make a hundred of these, it'll be impressive. If they make a thousand it'll be scary.
The weakest point of any robot now is the energy source. Even with the most advanced AI and body it will be tethered to the power network or some big battery. It will negatively affect potential adoption outside of the places like warehouses, factories, hotels, malls, bars, etc.
Tethering worked for Evangelions tho
The question is if they figured out that the robot needs to run off two batteries so it can swap them out of itself, or not.
As my parents get older, I'm starting to understand the real value that robots / autonomous driving has for addressing core accessibility issues.
I have no idea about the maturity of this company in particular, but it's interesting that glossy robotics startups never lean in on that as a core user base.
Check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqP8IXA-UXs it shows how critical lifting with weights is for old people.
I think we have A LOT of old people in precare situations because they are not aware of the possible difference this can make.
It's because they are not ready for real life applications (yet). Currently makers of humanoid robots have to ride the hype train, and this works better with addressing the desire of owning a bot that will make your life more luxurious.
I don't get it. Humanoids are a really crappy shape for a lot of tasks, and the only benefit seems to be the ability to pay people to walk around in motion capture suits for training.
Yeah but they're a crappy shape for A LOT of tasks. It's not ideal but it's a versatile solution.
Yeah but the world is designed around that crappy shape.
Man, watching the robot delivering a package was an uncanny valley moment for me. Frickin' Star Wars droids. I think it would be a little too weird for me to be surrounded by lifelike military-looking androidds.
There isn't an amount of money you could pay me (or maybe there is at the limit!) to have one of these wandering around my home ...
I think these robotic companies need to move away from humanoid appearance / form.
I'm not paying attention to humanoid robots until they show the hand dexterity of a 10 year old.
[dead]
4 of them please, going to spend every night playing poker on a real green!
Looks a lot like 1X now with the meshed white dress.
> Charging coils in the robot’s feet allow it to simply step onto a wireless stand and charge at 2 kW.
This is silly. Wireless charging is inefficient and costly compared to cables but we use it for the convenience of humans, to avoid the annoyance of having to plug something in repeatedly. Obviously a humanoid robot should simply plug in its own cable! No human need be inconvenienced. Wireless charging has no benefit here at all.
> Each fingertip sensor can detect forces as small as three grams of pressure - sensitive enough to register the weight of a paperclip resting on your finger
Three grams would be a very heavy paperclip. I have seen several types of touch sensor and while the technology is impressive I don't think any of them are durable enough for real use. Even human skin doesn't rely on durability alone. Healing is critical. But healing is infeasible for robots so instead we need to design repairable, replaceable, disposable, ideally recyclable parts, especially for the fingers that touch everything. This hand looks monolithic and not repairable.
All that said, I'm looking forward to seeing if their claims about cost and manufacturing volume pan out. Those are the things that matter the most right now, along with reliability. We need large numbers of robots operating continuously in the world to collect the data that will enable us to train robot AI. Right now there's basically only one or two companies with scaled humanoid production (for a very loose definition of "scaled") and they are in China. I'm rooting for anyone who can manufacture robots outside of China.
The clear implication is that they cannot, in fact, handle plugging themselves in. Take from that what you will
I'm surprised it doesn't just have physical connection to the little stand it's sitting on.
30 years ago we figured out how to contact charge cordless phones with metal pads and prongs.
How does Figure 03 know if the washer is actually on? I know it has tactile sensors on its fingers but if it tried to press the button and missed how would it know? I know it's probably not by sound.
I’m sure the sensor signals look different when you press a button vs when you hit a wall. Enough that it could certainly be learned by a model
Why not? It has microphones.
I assume that with whatever onboard audio model they use, it can only handle conversational type audio.
The site has a definite kill-you-in-your-sleep vibe with the dark undertones and the alien eyeless appearance.
Where are the designers tasked with stirring clear off the uncanny valley?
I noticed that they again saying that their botq factory going to make 12K per year once the first line instantiated. But this is what they mentioned already since March, so no progress there?
The site uses the word Helix so frequently that I began to feel stupid for having no idea what it means. Helix is used in so many different linguistic settings that it's not clear what it is.
It's explained in the first bullet point, even before the fold:
> Helix: Figure 03 features a completely redesigned sensory suite and hand system which is purpose-built to enable Helix - Figure's proprietary vision-language-action AI.
‘Helix, our AI system, is a generalist humanoid Vision-Language-Action model that learns and improves over time as it acquires new skills.’
Aha, now its clear ;)
It's the marketing name for their in house AI model.
Anyone currently developing a solution for the large scale data challenges that these video-streaming robots will have in their R&D phase?
I know the current early generations of humanoid robots are very janky and slow, but I'd gladly pay $20k USD for a robot to do all the household chores.
Really? I don't even think a cheap robo-vac is a good purchase.
I have one (a Roborocks), and thinking of getting a second one for the second level of the house. Great value.
We work from home and have kids. Not only is the sound annoying, the kids will be too tempted to jump on it. Notwithstanding that, it doesn't seem to clean that well.
Yay still no multipart torso or roll axis on head but roll axis on pelvis that's getting used. That's cool.
To me one of the best metrics for capability and design of these kinds of machines is the extent in which their manufacturer makes use of them in their manufacturing process.
That tells me that the design is amenable to aftermarket service and maintenance and that the machines are capable of participating in relatively sophisticated manufacturing processes.
A graph with one line representing the number of hours of physical labour by humans per unit produced with another line representing number of hours of physical 'labour' by these robots per unit produced would be interesting to look at.
The intersection point between those two lines and the point where human input drops to zero are key points in humanity.
Yeah, that's a very good metric to look for. In the software space, one of the coolest things and a clear signal that "AI coding" is here was watching Aider's graph of "amount of code aider wrote itself in each PR" and seeing that number go up.
On the robot side, there are many things that have to go right. Hardware needs to become good enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to scale. Then you have the software stack on top that needs to scale in training, fine-tuning, control and generalisation. None of these are "easy" even in a lab setting. Doing it at scale, in production will be huge. And then there's data collection, where whoever does it better will probably win. Collecting data in peoples houses is problematic, but on the factory floor should be ok.
ATM my bet is on Tesla being the best positioned to best deliver (eventually). They have plenty of experience on all fronts, and more importantly they have ample places to test them. Their factories are as automated as possible, so it's safe to say that every human being still doing manual labor is critical in their role. As soon as they can replace some of them with humanoids, and see the "task success" number go up, they can scale it up all over their floors. And we know they can scale.
I used to think that generalist humanoid robots are still 10y out, due to hardware and generalist software stacks, but it seems like things are heating up. It's gonna be an interesting next decade.
It's very pretty, but having worked in robotics, reality isn't that smooth.
Also I'm not convinced that humanoids are an effective realization of robotics. The human shape and functions evolved from the biological pros and cons of our chemistry. That of robots is very different, so you'd expect similarly different shapes and functions.
The design taste on almost all these humanoid bots seems off. If I'm going to have some AI-powered alien in my house I want it to be and appear harmless, helpful, maybe even cute? These look creepy and dystopian.
90% of effective robotics is the "brain". A good brain could operate many different types of bodies and be effective. Humanoid form is mainly just marketing and to sucker gullible investors.
No, it’s so we don’t have to rebuild everything to have robot and human compatibility
If we make the robots humanoid, they get compatibility with human systems for free
I want one just to jailbreak
Why does the house not have stairs? Ohh.
Reminds me of the Linkin park song
how does this compare to unitree G1?
R. Daneel Olivaw in the house!
Humanoids are Silicon Valley's horseless carriage. The purpose of robotics, and tools in general, is to do things better than we can given our human form and cognition. Tools take on forms that are optimized for their intended purpose. A humanoid has no market fit because it's necessarily bounded by most of the same limits we have.
The point of a humaniod is compatibility with systems that have been built for humans, which is...nearly all systems that have been built. Environments and tools that exist in the world are ones that have been built for humans, so for a single robot to be able to interact with almost all of those, that robot needs to be shaped like a human.
Better than or more cheaply.
Can we just slap some arms on a washer/dryer combo unit if we think that'll work? We skip having to design bi-pedal balance, increase the power envelope, and greatly reduce scope and cost.
Surely there's a market for an appliance that can load, wash, dry, fold where the only human interaction is dumping the clothes and soap within arm's reach.
Yeah, Lume came out with a lamp robot clothes folding arm marketing video, so you're not alone in thinking that.
https://youtu.be/zBCu8HmXoRo will robot abuse become a new fetish?
I find it funny that they deliberately avoid having the figure robot actually touch water when "washing the dishes". I have to wonder why it doesn't use a rubber wrapping around the hands or some other waterproof solution.
How are they trained to your preferences?
> "Continuing our vision for a fully autonomous, wire-free system"
Alongside the full replacement of jobs and with autonomous robots, This is the exact definition of "AGI".
now put Figure 03 to the factory to manufacture itself
This company will go to zero when the AI bubble bursts.
Put one of these things on the streets of France, and I don't give it one hour before it gets beaten to pieces.
I mean, I so want to trash it myself, and I am the non-violent type.
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