It's a nice piece of machinery. Looks like they finally went all-electric and got rid of the hydraulics. The new model is much less bulky.<p>The task it is doing is undemanding. It's just moving things from one set of large slots to another. No need for precision placement, unstructured bin-picking, or object separation. If it could pick up engine covers from the messy pile seen atop one of the racks and slot them into the storage unit, that would be more impressive. It's cool to see this done with a humanoid, but off the shelf industrial robots could do that job. This is the same place where Rethink Robotics got stuck. They could do simple object movements in mostly-structured situations, but so can lots of other simpler approaches.<p>Amazon, despite substantial efforts, still doesn't have full robot picking. About two years ago, Amazon announced their "Sparrow" picking robot. But that seems to be experimental. It's not seen in videos of Amazon warehouses in 2024. Amazon is using the Agility humanoid, but only experimentally.[1]<p>This is how Amazon currently does picking.[2] Racks of product come to the picker on robotic platforms. The picking system projects a light square on the space in the rack from which the picker should take the product. The picker picks the item, waves it under a barcode scanner, and drops it in an outgoing bin. Repeat for 8 hours. The job requires no more than a room-temperature IQ. Machines should think. People should work.<p>Amazon keeps trying to automate that step.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8IdbodRG14" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8IdbodRG14</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsIjagFEv84" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsIjagFEv84</a>
Anyone who don't know what manufacturing automation looked like for past decades should go watch those "factory tours" video or two. Then write down what are shared characteristics of manually handled objects in it and what are deltas between those videos and this. There are just way too many fantasies around here.<p>1: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQeQWGqfFN0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQeQWGqfFN0</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csifG1AM5d8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csifG1AM5d8</a><p>3: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg8YYuLLoM0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg8YYuLLoM0</a>
what a relief it will be to be released from doing manual tasks for a living and to be able to finally engage every waking moment in an all against all struggle for power.
While humanoid robots are neat, if not uncanny, I would love to see robots with forms optimized for their work. A large octopus with legs would be ideal for this sort of parts handling job.
One immediate use I can see for this robot is racking and energizing circuit breakers in electrical switchgear, which is one of the most dangerous things an electrician does. Arc flashes are very bad for humans, robots can be replaced easily.<p>Racking 480V three-phase breakers: <a href="https://youtu.be/Rytjdqj_Img" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Rytjdqj_Img</a>
The video is impressive, but how does it learn? How long does it take before it can do something new? I realize this is still very much a research project, but I'd love to understand how it works.
Chinese Unitree's demos are better by now imo.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFTc4W8wm0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFTc4W8wm0</a>
I'm impressed but I'm also surprised to see the robot stop and appear to think. I would have thought the computing and sensors wouldn't take so long to form decisions.
I don't know why people are impressed. Robots are hard and this is a big step forward but it's still useless. This is far from being as functional as automotive manufacturing robots or even vacuum cleaners. This is nothing like the goal we're striving for with these things. There's very a long way to go until this does what we want.
Impressive. The machine learning application in these domains is the real game changer.<p>PS: Isn't that the Lord of the Lithium, the Guardian of the Tunnels has the robot prototypes that not only serve drinks but do the small talk with full self driving AGI already?
do they really have this kind of jobs of moving parts from one shelf to another in a real factory?<p>I think a more impressive demo would be last-mile package delivery, since it can climb stairs and operate elevators.
I think whenever I see humanoid robots like this: What is the battery life? I imagine this will be a critical limitation on these, until further notice.
Looking at the cool non-human movement of the head, the upper torso and the legs i'm wondering if changing the legs so that they are symmetrical, instead of the knees only bending in one direction, is a coming improvement. That way it could walk forward and backward.
How long before someone can buy a robot to do a manual labor job for them? I mean, buy a robot and send it to some company to do a daily job where the company pays the robot owner for the use of the robot?
How is its situational awareness? While walking with its elbow out carousing the item, would it avoid an object that would be out of its view by the time it was about to collide with its extended elbow?
At this point i consider these as fun show-off non-products.<p>Boston dyns may be building actual products for the US army, but none of their videos is interesting anymore. It s like watching Hollywood stunts
Any one's tried LLM on a bipedal robot? I feel like with Anthropic's Computer Use (LLM trained with visual and controls a mouse), there start to be some overlapping
See, this is a real video. Compare it with the obvious cgi fake that was put out a few months ago by Figure: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw</a> I still can't believe how noone has called them out on that one.
Still find it comical that Masayoshi sold it to Hyundai instead of Tesla. BD was the perfect fit for Tesla at the time.<p>Now not so much and I am glad BD isn’t under Tesla umbrella.
Compare this to the human controlled puppets Tesla demonstrated. Tesla made a big show of something Disney could do years ago. While Boston Dynamics is quietly building the real thing and showing us footage of it actually working.
In which aspect is this better than a human?* It's slower, energy-wise more expensive (a human with just a sandwich can work for hours), less preciss and error-prone. As a Manager, I would prefer a person that I can blame (corporative and legally) if something goes wrong, that being responsible (legally, mainly!) if this robot makes a huge mistake.<p>* From a business point of view. This is an incredible techinal achievement, I don't want to sound like this is not impressive. But it seems that every new development seems to focus on how they can replace humans or be better at or do things that we usually do.