There has been a lot of criticism on Hacker News about Elon Musk and his new robot.<p>I worked for Joe Engelberger, "the Father of Robotics", at Unimation.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Engelberger )<p>Joe travelled to the world, visiting a lot of industrial sites. When he came back to the Danbury headquarters he would stop by my desk for a while. We talked about various "wild ideas" that Unimation might pursue. I was "just a guy in the research department" (there were only 2 of us) but we had great fun discussing ideas.<p>For example, Joe visited a brick manufacturing site. Bricks are stacked in a certain pattern on a pallet to let them cool. Could a Unimate stack those bricks? The issue was that a Unimate had very limited memory and there was not enough to encode all of the brick locations. We talked about using a PDP 11/03 to drive the robot (I had just got that working in the lab).<p>Joe was "an idea man", always imagining the next practical thing. He wanted "real automation", not blue sky things. They had to work, they had to be useful, and they had to be made in industrial volumes.<p>Elon is the same sort of person. He's not just building a robot. He's building a "real automation" robot, one that works, is useful, and made in industrial volumes.<p>This class of problems is hard. It is easy to be critical if you're not the person trying to solve the problem. Having worked in robotics, I have to say I'm impressed with his robot.<p>I could only wish to have Elon stop by my desk with these kind of ideas.