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The killer product of robotics could be a low-cost collaborative manipulator

95 点作者 lorepieri超过 3 年前

24 条评论

rsync超过 3 年前
I don&#x27;t think this is the killer app for robotics.<p>I think the killer app - and something I would pay for immediately - is a moveable platform programmed to travel between waypoints.<p>So, a platform that stays level regardless of terrain and you put stuff on it and tell it to go to the (living room, backyard, carport, barn, whatever).<p>I arrive home with a load of groceries and I put four bags on this platform and press the &quot;kitchen&quot; button.<p>That&#x27;s it. Just a magic box that transports (slowly) things to places around your yard&#x2F;property&#x2F;warehouse.
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mediaman超过 3 年前
The author is primarily focused on the cost of hardware, while ignoring most of the challenges of software (folding clothes, the dishwasher, whatever) by saying software companies will figure it out with AI.<p>A low speed, low accuracy robot was tried with Rethink Robotics, founded by the Roomba guy (Rodney Brooks), who tried to compete with Universal Robots and got their clock cleaned. Nobody in industry wanted a slow, inaccurate robot, even at a good price.<p>What&#x27;s holding us back in robotics is not the cost of hardware. There are plenty of use cases of $40k robots that are still not pursued because engineering special end effectors and integration is too difficult, not because of the cost of the robot. Reducing the cost of the robot to $10k makes no difference in those applications because it&#x27;s not the gating factor.<p>The idea that companies will just figure out folding clothes and other complicated tasks because the cost of hardware falls is, I believe, fanciful, but I hope I&#x27;m wrong. Maybe &quot;AI&quot; will <i>hand-wave</i> solve it.
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jvanderbot超过 3 年前
If you narrowly define robots as arms, wheels, or floating eyes, then yeah, you&#x27;re going to have a tough time.<p>My kitchen is full of cheap, perfect robots. A microwave with cook sensor, a fridge that makes ice, a coffee pot with timer and brew settings, a pressure cooker that somehow cooks everything perfectly all the time.<p>In my garage I have a door opener, a clothes washer, a clothes dryer, some motion sensing lights.<p>In my backyard I have a sprinkler set that waters the lawn.<p>On and on ...<p>Those are the killer robotic apps, and we&#x27;ve been refining them for 100 years. When I teach classes, I honestly get a laugh when I say that the toaster is the most perfect robotic design of all time from a customer service perspective.
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mikepurvis超过 3 年前
This was essentially Willow Garage&#x27;s pitch with the PR2, like a decade ago. Obviously they were several orders of magnitude off on the price point, but that was the idea— an &quot;appable robot&quot; with standard hardware that everyone would rush to write new capabilities for.<p>The home is always going to be a nightmare environment for this kind of thing, though— even without the mundane issues of stairs, doorknobs, appliances with varying interfaces, and hazards like pets and clutter, there&#x27;s just far too much breadth of potential tasks to want it to do.<p>Later companies understood that zeroing in on a few tasks to do well and repeatedly (delivery, laundry, floor-cleaning, etc), in ADA-compliant environments (hotels, hospitals, airports), was a much less scary place to start.
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LeifCarrotson超过 3 年前
The problem with the author&#x27;s vision is that geared brushless servo actuators like the Gyems they used, all generally similar to the original MIT Cheetah actuators (or steppers, another popular motor) require precision low-backlash gearboxes with large bearings and servos with high-speed control electronics. They also need high-resolution force&#x2F;torque sensors to be collaborative capable, and if you require it to not fall down when E-stopped, you need brakes. All of that has become impressively cheap for what it is, but scale and progress can only do so much - that hardware will always be expensive.<p>The problem is they&#x27;re starting this effort from the basic joint being an electric motor. When you start there, this all follows as what you have to do to build a robot, you&#x27;re forced into a corner in your design. Instead, it&#x27;s far better to have the safety and operation come inherently from the way the product is designed.<p>I saw an impressive demo at an automation conference about a decade ago, it was a cobot where the motion was based on inflation of pneumatic bladders. It functioned similar to the way biological muscles work. It did not need gear reduction, or force sensors, or brakes, or high-speed amplifiers. If it ran into something (or something ran into it), it didn&#x27;t strip gearboxes, the bladder just complied.<p>I think that will be the &#x27;killer cobot&#x27; someday, but it&#x27;s going to be hard to impossible to launch into the industrial space.
motoboi超过 3 年前
It seems robotics suffer from the same problem as AI: every-time it advances and come into contact with the public, it becomes something else.<p>I explain: we already have an incredible successful robot. It’s the roomba (and it’s imitators). It’s a robot, but suddenly it’s not the robot we’ve all been waiting for.<p>Just as Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant suddenly are not widely seen as AÍ because, even when they can talk, recognize your speak, search for content and do some tasks, they are not the artificial intelligence we have been waiting for.<p>It seems we’ll always raise the bar, no matter what.<p>200 years from now, taking, walking, autonomous smiling android: not a robot.
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PerkinWarwick超过 3 年前
Huh.<p>I always assumed it was going to be teledildonics.<p>..damn, a downvote. I mean, who can be against teledildonics? That&#x27;ll be the main thrust of technology when our robot lords and masters take charge.
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dougmwne超过 3 年前
Why bother programming these arms with near miraculous AI for household use when you could have pilots a world away clean your kitchen?
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jjk166超过 3 年前
&gt; Seriously, look at the UR5, when was the last time you loaded a dishwasher with 0.1 millimeter precision? Or which kitchen appliance did you use for 35.000 hours at full capacity? Or what clothes weigh 5+ kilograms?<p>The author underestimates the physical requirements for most tasks we do day to day. 0.1mm precision is roughly the accuracy you need to put a #8 screw into a clearance hole toleranced for a loose fit. One might think when loading a dishwasher that you don&#x27;t need to be precise because the dish can go &quot;anywhere&quot;, but in reality that&#x27;s just because a human fundamentally understands where plates can and can&#x27;t go, and can adjust their movements accordingly. If you are trying to place a dish on a granite countertop, and the plate goes 0.1mm into the countertop, you&#x27;re going to notice. Such a robot arm would just barely be able to peel a potato.<p>5kg of payload may sound like a lot, but it really isn&#x27;t. For starters, that doesn&#x27;t include the weight of the end effector. Then this is the max load that the robot can support, but if you need to manipulate something quickly and precisely, that further reduces max payload. Holding a single item of clothing should still be fine, but what about say pulling on an item of clothing out from under a pile of laundry? Or how about lifting a pot of water off a burner on your stove? Pouring a glass of milk from a gallon jug would be close to the limit of what such an arm can handle.
aazaa超过 3 年前
&gt; Low cost: Less than 1000 USD for the robot hardware.<p>I&#x27;m not sure where this figure comes from. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Apple ][ cost ~ $6,000.<p>&gt; Previously shown off to a few thousand rabid fans at the West Coast Computer Faire, the Apple II’s arrival means the masses can finally get their hands on the breakthrough machine. A base unit costs $1,298 — the equivalent of $5,810 in 2021 money.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cultofmac.com&#x2F;484382&#x2F;tiah-apple-ii-goes-on-sale&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cultofmac.com&#x2F;484382&#x2F;tiah-apple-ii-goes-on-sale&#x2F;</a><p>Maybe all it takes is a good, but overpriced robot selling for around $6,000. The high cost of Apple&#x27;s first computers was a major driver for a work-alike computer market that included Atari, Commodore, TI, Coleco, and Tandy.<p>If the Marketplace Disruption view of PC history is any guide, I suspect the first wildly successful robotic product will cause professionals to turn up their noses in disgust at the triviality of it all. They&#x27;ll bemoan the lack of practical applications. They&#x27;ll cluck at all of the things it can&#x27;t do. Meanwhile, a small group of buyers will find the toy-like things irresistible. This product might have already been introduced.<p>Also, it&#x27;s instructive to consider all of the things that were predicted for home computers vs. how things ended up turning out. Many of the concepts were sound (games, recipes), but few thought of the role a ubiquitous, worldwide, fast network infrastructure would play in creating entirely new classes of uses for small computers. And almost nobody predicted the astonishing rate of miniaturization&#x2F;performance increases that would occur and which continues to this day.
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runako超过 3 年前
I honestly think there&#x27;s a lot more runway for single-purpose &quot;smarter&quot; appliances than general-purpose robots.<p>The &quot;iPhone of Robotics&quot; probably looks more like personal ownership of several robots: Roomba, iLaundry, iFoodPrep, iPutAwayGroceries, iPutAwayDishes, etc. iRobot has built a solid business reasonably automating a single household chore. I would bet an all-in-one laundry machine or bathroom cleaning robot could also do compelling sales.<p>At a minimum, it seems very ambitious to try to attempt to solve via robotics problems that are not well-solved using single-purpose machines.
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pama超过 3 年前
We already have accepted robotic vacuum cleaners. Why not simply expand on that idea with adding simple manipulators on top of them: put away the shoes, pick up socks, empty the pet litter, …
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daenz超过 3 年前
I want someone to build a collection of small IoT robots that can be customized to perform very small specific actions. The purpose of these robots would be to bridge the gap between analog human actions and the digital world, without requiring that everyone get a &quot;smart toaster&#x2F;oven&#x2F;lightswitch&#x2F;etc&quot;.<p>For example, you might have a little robot that can have an attached rotary gripper, for ensuring that the stove top is off. It sits on the stove knob and can turn it based on some input. Or one that can open a deadbolt from the inside. Or one that can brace against a door frame and turn a door handle. You could even include a tiny, low resolution camera that can snapshot the current state of the thing that the robot is controlling.<p>Having these devices be adaptable, with different attachments, would be important to making sure they work in the most situations. Whatever attachments you put on, and how you position them, are unique to whatever analog device you are interested in controlling. Some could brace themselves against the surroundings, some could be screwed into a wall. The key is options.
packet_nerd超过 3 年前
I want an appliance that combines the functions of refrigerator, pantry, stove, oven, dishwasher, and that has manipulators inside capable of picking the ingredients, cleaning, peeling, chopping, and otherwise preparing them, cooking the entire meal, cleaning up, and spiting out the meal on serving dishes. :-)<p>It should be able to cook good tasting homemade meals from real ingredients (even fresh from the garden if you have a garden), not just plastic wrapped junk food. You load food items through hopper or door in one side, then a manipulator arm picks them up, reads or otherwise identifies what they are, and stores them in the inbuilt pantry or refrigerator.<p>It should keep an inventory of the refrigerator and panty and be able to suggest recipes that use what you have on hand while optimizing for cost, nutrition, and minimizing wasted food from spoilage. It should be able to produce shopping lists for you based on foods you use frequently or recipes you want to cook in the future. (It could even auto order foods and have them delivered, although I like the idea of just getting a shopping list and buying it myself better.)<p>It should be able to help you avoid wasting leftover foods by reaccepting leftovers, storing them, displaying the leftovers as a suggestion for the next meals so you don&#x27;t forget, and know the optimal way to reheat or re-prepare them.<p>It should be controlled through an app on your phone, over the local network, and definitely not dependent on some cloud service. You should be able to still get a nice hot supper if the Internet goes down.<p>The app should show you a list of recipes that can be made with the ingredients on hand, you pick one or a couple, it tells you how long it&#x27;s going to take to prepare. You tap go, and 45min later you have a perfect homecooked supper!
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arduinomancer超过 3 年前
I feel like an iPhone of robotics is pretty irrelevant at the moment.<p>We can&#x27;t even build a single-chore robot at the moment that replaces a human.<p>The software side of &quot;chore-robots&quot; is totally beyond anything that currently exists.<p>Think about the basic task of washing&#x2F;folding&#x2F;putting away clothes.<p>The AI would need<p>* Full 3D spatial navigation<p>* Be able to identify what is clothing<p>* Be able to reliably pick up clothing<p>* Be able to open doors to get around the house<p>* Somehow know how to operate every model of washer&#x2F;dryer, including different possible placements of the machines<p>* Somehow know how to fold any clothing item<p>* Somehow know where to put the folded clothes (be able to open any kind of dresser?)<p>If you wanted to solve this you&#x27;d probably start with things like &quot;well maybe there&#x27;s a designated clothes bin that comes with the product that the robot understands&quot; or &quot;well maybe we make the user mark out exactly the space where they want the clothes placed&quot;<p>But then you&#x27;re leaving general AI territory at that point and heading back in regular robotics territory where the solution is to put the problem &quot;on rails&quot; as much as possible.
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lifeisstillgood超过 3 年前
My utterly uninformed views:<p>The &quot;markets&quot; where robotics <i>could</i> have orders of magnitude effects are what I call field to factory. The most obvious item is construction. A pre-fabricated house is cheaper and waaaay faster to build because the factory has robots and assembly lines etc to help. But even on-site construction can be assisted - that is turning the field into a temporary factory.<p>My sneaking suspicion is that just as we call any AI that works ML because while it does a specific job, we expect it to <i>think</i> like us instead of bringing what it is.<p>And for robotics we will have many amazing advances and social changes, but we will expect it to <i>move</i> like us so won&#x27;t call it robotics.<p>This also leads to a second problem I think adoption will hit - robots will find an uncanny valley and it is easier and simpler to just build something that is in no way organic-like just to avoid human &quot;yuck&quot; factor. I can imagine some giant spider like contraption that washes up really well, and simply never selling because it looks like a giant freaking spider.
KaiserPro超过 3 年前
to me the killer robot is either the dishwasher or the washing machine.<p>however thats not very forward looking of me.<p>We don&#x27;t really need SCADA manipulators for clothes folding, we need a machine that we can just dump our washing in. Inside they might have a 6 axis arm, but I doubt it. There are machines that kinda do that for industrial linen companies. However they are huge and expensive, and you still need to feed in the clothes one by one.<p>Now what a decent robot arm could be used for is augmenting VR. Being able to tug, push, block and parry a person who&#x27;s playing a sword game would be brilliant fun. Not without safety headaches, but fun.<p>I do agree that a decent arm thats cheap and powerful would unlock innovation. But they sorta do exist now. However we really need a usable IK library that doesn&#x27;t require a maths degree to setup. We also need a library that would allow easy planning of moves as well. Its possible today, but hard.<p>Think trying to fetch and parse a JSON file over HTTP on a first generation arduino. Thats where we are with the libraries to make Robot arms usable.
lykahb超过 3 年前
&gt; New revenue streams: app-store fees, data-mining, new advertisement channels.<p>Please no! Granting corporations control over your home physical environment is a dystopian scenario. Home hardware should be simple and reliable. The market has killed Juicero, and I hope that any company, that tries to pull this off, follows their way.
contingencies超过 3 年前
Recently, globally, there have been a staggering number of generally half-baked ROS-driven startups attempting to sell investors on the future of industrial robot arms making food. A closely allied, next-wave group are those selling commercial kitchens on the future of industrial conveyor belts preparing pizzas.
fsflover超过 3 年前
The article suggests that the successful business model of such robot would be to provide hardware and open it to third-party apps. This is exactly what Pine64 is doing with their laptops, smartphones and other devices, and it seems to work fine. No software is required at all, everything is done by volunteers with FLOSS!
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DonHopkins超过 3 年前
That&#x27;s certainly a frightening headline: invisible killer robots lurking around every corner.<p>Maybe the killer app is selling &quot;Robot Insurance&quot; to people who are terrified by headlines like that.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM</a>
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georgewsinger超过 3 年前
Insanely good article and instance of &quot;Definite Optimism&quot;.<p>I wish startup idea pitches were as clear as this essay.
rubyfan超过 3 年前
This falls well short of positronic brain powered robots that I was expecting U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. would be offering by now.
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cultofmetatron超过 3 年前
personally, I&#x27;d love a spot with a ronin sc type gimble attacked that follows me around while I vlog.