Boston Dynamic's four-legged Spot [1] and bipedal Atlas [2]. Agility Robotic's Digit [3]. It looks like robotic actuators are about to hit an innovation wave.
Quasi-direct-drive actuators (BLDC motors with position Feedback and a modest, 5:1 or 10:1 gear ratio) are what you’re thinking of for Spot and similar. For Atlas, you kind of need the specific force and low speed specific power than hydraulics give you. That’s what Boston Dynamics uses for those larger dynamic robots (Atlas, Big Dog, etc). (Hydraulics are under-rated! They can be electrically pumped, so they need not be super loud.)
I think a bigger problem is that there isn't really a good safe way to directly interface a human limb to a mechanical one. Conventional prostheses distribute weight over tissues that didn't evolve to carry those loads and are therefore much less comfortable than a natural leg.
Mmm yeah, I suppose you'd have to figure out a way to connect up to bones for structural support and to connect actuators to. But hey as long as we're dreaming big, why not?
Maybe. Maybe not. But the real question is whether people in 10 years time would prefer a walking mobility scooter or a wheeled mobility scooter. When the Star Wars generation hits this point en-mass in 20-30 years, I predict there will be a huge market for personal AT-AT walkers.
Cost was a big factor at ~$400k. Also, it was heavy (~100 kg IIRC) so it shook the whole house going up stairs. Also, it was too wide for stairways in older houses.
And, if anything went wrong halfway up the stairs, you'd be going down ass-over-teakettle strapped to something metal weighing more than you.
All those things could be improved on. Maybe Mobius will succeed.
Right now when it's time to carry that heavy desk, couch, piano, etc. through doorways, halls, up/down stairs, etc., two really strong people do it manually.
Imagine if they showed up with a robot that could do it. In addition to walking, it would need to understand gripping and balancing heavy objects and how to orient and maneuver 3D objects through tight 3D spaces, but I bet those things are understood well enough.
Having worked as a mover for a while once upon a time, I don't think it would make much difference as it is now. It's very rare for any moving job to require more physical strength than an average adult male has. The challenge is more like understanding how to handle items without damaging them or the building, what order to move things in so that a truck can be packed well. We'll need a lot more real-world intelligence from robots before they can do something like that.
Unusual physical strength, or powered mechanical aids, are mostly only used with unusual items. Ex, most "gunsafes" are more properly Residential Security Containers, and aren't all that heavy (~200lbs) and can be moved around, including up stairs, by two average adults. Real safes weigh more like 600lbs and are much more rare, partly due to the difficulty and expense involved in moving them anywhere remotely tricky. I have heard of powered stair climbers being used to lift such things up a flight of stairs.
This sounds like you're used to moving between suburbs and not old European multi-storey buildings with narrow stairs without elevator and no ability to use an external lift due to small windows.
A good mix of types of places. Some suburbs, though they sometimes have awkward internal stairs. Plenty of American style 3-story apartments, their stairs mostly aren't too bad. I dunno man, it mostly isn't that tough once you get used to it.
Solving the issue of climbing on stairs seems to be much more simple than a robot with legs, there are already solutions in the market, most of them based on wheels or tracks
His takeaway was that the big use cases currently are around LIDAR and mapping, e.g. tracking construction progress, in irregular / uneven terrain.
I'm less convinced that walking robots are useful for some of the use cases described in the Economist article, like moving boxes in a warehouse. After all, warehouses are generally built to facilitate wheeled vehicles (forklifts) already...
yes, it's been common knowledge in biomechanics that wheeled vehicles win on flat surfaces, hands down (ha). legs are good for the 99.9% of earth's land that isn't nearly as predictable. the general utility of accessing that 99.9% is relatively dispersed though (and hard to build a business on).
Simply using big wheels or tracks work for non-flat surfaces, too, and are cheaper & more efficient (especially the wheels).
Legs allow you to climb, ie a ladder, very steep stairs ( more than 45 degrees), a tree, or an extremely steep rough slope (think: mountain).
A tracked vehicle or large-wheeled vehicle can go almost anywhere a legged robot can go with a large efficiency and cost advantage.
However, you can run into space constraints. Bipedal robots are good for navigating human-scale environments while still having a tall and stable robot.
But generally, tracks or big wheels are way cheaper and more efficient and can do the same thing.
sure, bigger wheels and tracks can get you some greater percentage of navigable land, but nowhere near 100%. most terrestrial animals uses legs and not wheels for a reason (and it's not because it's not evolutionarily possible).
but yes, bigger wheels and tracks probably cover a greater percentage of the commercially viable landscape.
It is close to evolutionarily impossible to do a wheel and axle biologically. If the whole animal rolls, sure, but not a full wheel and axle (macroscopically). That is probably the main reason we see zero macroscopic animals with that configuration.
biology on an evolutionary timescale is exceedingly clever, more ingenious than us humans. you don't need an axle, just something roundish (eyeballs or even pearls, for example).
The organism will need something like a fluid rotary union so the nervous and circulatory system can reach the rotating part, or that part will be limited to very low metabolic levels (basically diffusion). That will certainly be ingenious.
certainly, but biology is amazing. our muscles are basically chemical ratchets interconnected throughout a mosaic of levers (ignoring the complex control and feedback mechanisms, as well as the energy and waste systems, for a moment).
also, your point is why i mentioned pearls--not all tissue needs to be activated or enervated similarly, or at all.
we should have no doubt that biology would find a way given enough time.
It has found a way! Through engineering. We invented wheels, and we’re a result of evolution. Dung beetles have engineered something similar, although no axle (yet).
That would be really really hard to achieve in nature. What about a millipede? To me they're the closest thing to a legged and a tracked-like creature.
Not to invoke fiction as proof, but Philip Pullman hypothesized animals with a shiny claw which co-evolves with a tree making wheels. The claw evolves to be the axle and the tree evolves to make the wheels for co-benefit.
that's exactly the limited engineering perspective to be wary of. biology doesn't consider those things, it just finds a way in a staggeringly multidimensional space of real consequences (also, muscles are just one, amazing, component of a holistic locomotory organism). rotary locomotion likely evolved multiple times over the eons and was outcompeted away by legged (and other) creatures with more mobility to find food and mates. for a potential analogue/precursor, consider the rotary joints we have in our bodies.
legged locomotion has evolved to be quite efficient in certain ways too. human legs, for instance, evolved for walking/jogging long distances efficiently (we have 2 gait-dependent locomotory efficiency points at two different speeds). but we can also climb and run and kick and hop and swim and more when required, unlike rollers.
> rotary locomotion likely evolved multiple times over the eons and was outcompeted away by legged (and other) creatures with more mobility to find food and mates.
Unlikely. Something that has the possibility to be so staggeringly more efficient would have found some niche even in present day. At least one spider makes itself into a wheel to roll down sand dunes faster than a predatory wasp can follow.
When something as complicated and calorically expensive as vision can evolve multiple times, the fact that rotary power hasn't evolved says that there is a block somewhere.
And, rotary power has evolved in some flagellar creatures. However, what evolved was a cellular ratchet. The system can go one direction only, and there was effectively no fine control for exactly the reasons I mentioned.
> for a potential analogue/precursor, consider the rotary joints we have in our bodies.
And those joints have complicated musculature and are relatively easy to permanently damage.
Our built environment has been designed for the human form, so a general purpose robot will necessarily be humanoid. Essentially we would leverage the existing interface between humans and structures/machines - instead of having to create a new interface for robots to interact with their environment.
This is a hugely important point and much of the reason I chose a wheeled or tracked robot over a legged one for a project I’m working on. My workplace is supposed to be accessible, and to the degree that it isn’t, my workplace is federally required to fix it. So in some ways adding a tracked/wheeled robot to the mix could also help us find ways to make our workplace more welcoming for wheelchair users. As a mobility platform, a wheeled/tracked platform is more efficient, more open (less overhead), probably more robust (doesn’t fall over of power is lost mid-stride), an order of magnitude less costly, and it may even enhance workplace accessibility. Win-win.
Indeed! And by digging up some wheelchair accessibility specs you will know exactly the form your robot needs to take to take advantage of that interface.
This is disparagingly referred to as momtech. Young silicon valley transplants try to replace the role of their parents with technology. They want to avoid cooking and cleaning so they can code all the time. "If only a robot could do my dishes for me!"
It's the epitome of fitting a solution to a problem. Cooking and cleaning are simple tasks that any able bodied person can do themselves. There is no shortage of able bodied people in the world.
A good rule of thumb when dismissing some new technology is to ask, "what previous technologies would I have dismissed for the same reasons?" And if those technologies became successful, try to learn from the mistake.
In this case, clothes washing machines and vacuum cleaners seem to fit your thesis.
And the Roomba fits this rule of thumb again by replacing the vacuum cleaner (which replaced, what, taking rugs outside and beating them with sticks?)
On a tangent: How was wall-to-wall carpeting cleaned before the invention of the Hoover? Did it just not exist before then? Or it just collected dirt until it was replaced?
Carpet was for the rich. Normal people had much cheaper hardwood floors which were cleaned with a broom. The rich had servants, though I'm not sure what they did to clean (I think take it all outside)
Indeed. A guy named Hans Rosling did a Ted talk about 10 years ago arguing that the washing machine had one of the biggest impacts of any invention from the Industrial Revolution. It's worth looking up if you have 10 minutes to burn, he makes a good case.
It's a strong argument for a belief I currently have, in what I think is essentially "technological determinism". I sum it up like this: the shape of human societies are essentially determined by economic landscape (that, I would hope, is an obvious point). Scientific and technological progress is what reshapes the economic landscape. Therefore, culture is downstream from sci/tech.
Washing machines freeing enormous amount of time for people (particularly mothers, who could use that time to e.g. read books to children or educate themselves) are one example. The other I like is the Reformation: why did Martin Luther succeed where previous attempts at reforming the Church have failed? Because the newly invented printing press allowed for the theses to spread across the Old World much faster than the Church could control it.
Looking at Wikipedia, this, technological determinism and economical determinism are related concepts (with the same names appearing in articles about them). I'll need to look into getting my taxonomy straight, but my current view is mostly contained in the explanation I gave in the comment above: inventions shape the landscape of the economy, and ideas/culture are like water flowing in that landscape (and perhaps slowly eroding it).
Right, historical materialism doesn't conflict with any of that, but it extends its analysis to the power structures that arise in society as a result of the material economic conditions.
An example of beliefs affecting technology is the coal industry's wildly successful astroturfing campaign against nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nuclear power was an existential threat to coal mining but was derailed almost completely by manipulating people's beliefs.
This is one of those long-running debates in the social sciences.
The economist Dierdre McCloskey, for instance, argues forcefully that the revolution started with the idea that all souls weigh the same -- i.e., people are all equal under God. [1]
That conviction led to the belief that people should be allowed to read the Bible for themselves, which led to widespread literacy, which led to a demand for books, which allowed the printing press to survive and spread.
After much to-ing and fro-ing I think I'm more inclined to McCloskey's view, that cultural beliefs and values determine institutions, and so determine which technologies survive and which die out.
Of course these things are not one-way. Technology affects beliefs and institutions. But other things do, too, and McCloskey thinks the other things are at least equally as important.
I I could hire someone to come to my house for a few bucks a week I'd have servants. My coworkers in India have that, when they come to the US that is their biggest culture shock.
House chores and maintenance are two big things that are yet to be tackled by technology. They're quite literally life wasters - things you must do in order to get the things you want to do. Prime candidates for automating away, the opposite of "fitting a solution to a problem".
Where I live almost nobody have a robotic lawn mower, though I've seen a few on a "smart home" trade show the other day. Dishwashers however are truly magic and the second best time saver after washing machines.
But cutting out laundry, dishwashing and lawn mowing still leaves some time sinks. Like cooking, where machines currently solve the ingredient prep and the actual cooking parts, but do not help much with cleaning up the mess afterwards (beyond the baseline of using a dishwasher). Or dusting, laundry folding, general cleaning. These tasks I'd wish they could disappear.
And then there's the general category of maintenance - most of the products around us require regular care. Which gets annoying rather quickly.
The tech we have is cool, but there's so much more to be done! I'm hoping the future will eventually bring self-cleaning and self-repairing materials.
The slow march to cost-effectiveness continues. But no killer app yet.
Much of this is a mechanical design problem. You need to be able to generate large forces from a small package, but not all the time. Hydraulics can do it, but then you need a big pump and power source, like the older Boston Dynamics machines. Until recently, all-electric didn't have the power density. Now it does. Which is why quadrotor drones work.
Small polyphase permanent magnet motors ("brushless DC") have taken over. The controllers to drive them at variable speed are now cheap. No brushes, no arcing, no magnet demagnetization. The remaining limit on motor power is cooling.
It's too bad Schaft Robotics was liquidated. They were doing well on humanoids. Then Google bought them, trashed them, and dumped the remains.
They were into small liquid-cooled motors. That's a way to get huge torques when you need them.
Reduction gears are always a problem. If they're big enough not to snap gear teeth on shock loads, they're too heavy. Better materials for toothed belts have helped. Those have more space to absorb a shock load. Researchers like harmonic drives, because they can put a big reduction in a small package, but harmonic drives are especially vulnerable to broken gear teeth on overload.
Direct drive, without gears or belts, would be nice. The advantage of direct drive is, as someone said a century ago in the context of electric locomotives, "You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field." Washing machine motors are often direct drive today. The electronics is cheaper and more rugged than a gearbox. It's encouraging seeing that happen in a mass-market product.
There's a lot of engineering like that which needs to be done to get mobile robots down to the price of a non-luxury car.
> Then Google bought them, trashed them, and dumped the remains.
This seems to be a too oft repeated refrain. Google has become such a mire of intra-office politics that being acquired by them is almost a guaranteed death sentence.
In case somebody doesn't realize what this is about. IBM helped governments execute government programs. In 1939, IBM helped the then German government, the Nazi government since 1933, among other things with their new task of "ethnic identification", determining who was Jewish and who was not (because they had complex rules about that involving ancestry).
They continued doing this during the war, ... and during the "trial run" holocaust by the German and Austrian Youth Services, then the continuation of that trial run by the psychiatric institutions ... and then with the actual Holocaust. They used a Polish subsidiary, run by a Nazi (owned 90% by IBM), in case you were wondering how they did that without being convicted of treason.
Do you think there's any chance of direct drive generating enough torque for a roughly human sized robotic arm with human like performance (say to lift a 20 kg load) ?
The last time I looked into this it didn't look like that much torque was available in a small form factor. I found it rather surprising because larger scale industrial robot arms appear to far exceed any biological arm in both strength and speed.
I don't think a robot needs to lift more than 1kg or even less to be game changer. It just needs to be accurate and smart enough so that it can use different tools(i.e push different buttons) that do the heavy lifting.
I think we're talking about integrating robots into an environment that is designed for humans. As such robots pushing buttons is a good thing to reach for.
I still think that application is a dead end. Anything that has buttons on it these days (and increasingly so in the future) is likely to also have some kind of wifi or other remote and/or programmable interface so control of that machine really isn't something you need or want a robot to do. I'm not sure exactly what the parent had in mind but consider the problem of washing dishes. A robot that can load a dishwasher has value, a robot that can only press the start button not so much.
Pressing buttons was just a figure of speach. It could use wireless commands if course. My point is that we need a smart robot to supervise and "use" various devices(i.e the dishwasher).
It doesn't need to lift heavy things or do many tasks himself because it could use dumb tools/machines to do that just like humans use forklifts.
That's why I'm saying being smart/ingeligent is more important than how much it can lift or its battery autonomy.
That may be but if you want an equivalent robot arm driven by an ordinary motor you still need the torque. Otherwise you would need a completely different system of actuation. I've heard of "artificial muscle" systems but I'm not sure if they're sufficiently developed yet.
It's difficult to see, but the arm and hand are as strong as they are because the "motors" are one step up. The motors for the hand are (predominantly) in the lower arm. The motors for the lower arm are in the upper arm, pulling on ropes connected to the lower arm (and significantly bigger than the lower arm). And the muscles doing the full arm are what's covering the front and back of your upper torso.
This means that the force of your fingers is generated by a muscle roughly the size of a cola bottle, the force of your lower arm is generated by between 2 and 3 stacked cans of cola, and the force of your entire arm is generated by a muscle the size of a decent shoebox.
So while muscles are pretty good, they're worse than our best motors. Or at least, if you can provide them with the power they need they are. And you think this is not the case because your body hides pretty sizeable muscles in your torso where everybody thinks you have almost only organs and fat, when in fact about half is muscle.
So are you saying that using cables and motor driven pulleys is a better solution ?
Most robotic arms I've seen appear to have a motor located at the elbow joint that drives the equivalent of the lower arm either directly or through a gear box.
If cables and pulleys give better torque without loss of speed why aren't they in more widespread use in robotic arms ?
In industrial robot arms, the problem is not having enough power to lift the load. It's making the arm rigid enough that positioning the actuators will put the end at the desired point. Most industrial robot arms are position-controlled, usually rather blindly. Customers want repeatable motion to tight tolerances, like a machine tool. The mechanics are overbuilt and under-loaded to achieve that.
I've seen direct drive SCARA robots with a big pancake direct drive motor on top. Those are used for vertical assembly, for designs where a straight-down move puts the part in place. The arm moves in X and Y, then there's a vertical piston-like actuator that moves in Z, and a rotation axis around Z.
Anyone using machine vision to try to work around the positioning problem? Seems like working solely from proprioception is way harder than proprioception plus visual feedback.
The parent comment makes a good point. If accurate positioning is an issue it seems like you would want a closed loop control system that measures and optimizes for that. The position measurement itself could be made using machine vision or perhaps more precisely using lidar or some other technique. I've even wondered if that might allow you to build a less rigid and hence less expensive CNC mill.
There is lots of research pointing out that the problem may in fact be trying to do that at all. A significant issue with this is that humans can't do precision positioning of limbs in free space, yet can carry out all the tasks people want to use these robots for.
When you see surgeons, who have loads of theory about precision movements you will quickly find that they rely on feedback rather precision for their movements. For example, they cut along the "linea alba", not by knowing where it is and positioning the knife exactly, but by simply slicing down starting at a good enough position, knowing the knife will follow the linea alba because it's attracted to it. Which is a fancy way of saying that it's a force feedback problem, not a positioning problem.
Humans can be very precise when they need to be (ever try repairing any modern electronics ?) but yes they do that closed loop using both visual and tactile feedback.
They can't really. If I were to tell you to position your arm -5cm, 0cm, 0cm relative to your nose, I'd be impressed if you got the three numbers to match while passing through them. Holding a plate at that position for a minute while I put 1kg worth of objects on it is out of your capabilities. You use an object to move precisely around it. Not just visual feedback but (when I repair electronics I) use the electronics to keep most of my muscles in place, while only moving one or two, and not very precisely at that, I always need to correct things afterwards. Stopping is done using force feedback (hitting something), in case of soldering even smell comes into the picture.
I can hit a 2mm square target reliably with my an instrument held by my fingers (and my hand resting or held in place) and, say, a 2cm target with my hand. I get that I'm probably not surgeon material, but let's say they can double or triple that accuracy. 10x is out of range of any human without robotic help.
Robots are expected to do that with three numbers behind the decimal point and to keep that position, while carrying their load (varies from 200gr to 20ton). There is no way a human can do that, not even with 200gr, to an accuracy of a centimeter. And even trying will be so stressful you wouldn't be able to hold it for even a minute. A robot can hold it for 10 years.
It is also that as soon as you have a rigid robot with that force, speed, and without a steel fence as separation near a human, you have a safety problem.
If a human family member holds something like a baseball bat, or a butcher's knife within arms length of you, you can feel safe around them, and be sure they control their motions.
Contrarily, having an industrial robot with something like a screwdriver at the height of your head and within a meter of distance is just scary.
I'm not thinking of something as dumb as an industrial robot. You would want a safety mechanism that detects nearby humans (say in the same room) and switches to low power mode if any are present. That way you can get work done at a reasonable speed when the robot is alone with very little risk of hurting anyone. Yes, there are some safety issues to take into account with a household robot but they pale in comparison to those of a self-driving car whose whole reason for existence is to pilot a > 1 ton metal object at high speeds.
Back in high school I had an idea for strings of electromagnetics and springs acting like muscles when power was applied. Seemed like a cool idea but never really figured out if it was at all plausible. Are any of these systems trying to simulate muscles more directly?
It's amazing to think that so much of the future we imagined decades ago (flying cars, robots, jetpacks, maybe even leisure space travel) might be here if energy weren't an issue. If there's ever a 10x breakthrough in battery tech (today's performance with 10x the energy density), I'd bet the world would change pretty quickly. Even a 2x breakthrough.
You can throw "renewables" in there too. Everyone just assumes battery tech is on some kind of moore's law scaling just like how everyone thought SSDs were going to be 1c per TB by now.
Is it possible to make one of these robots cheaply? It seems like the cost of actuators (which you might need dozens of) and to a lesser extent sensors would make this cost-prohibitive for most uses.
For instance, if you were replacing a human salary, it might make sense to purchase a hundred-thousand-dollar robot, but if you just want something to pull weeds in your yard once in awhile, it might be hard to justify spending more than a couple thousand. If the parts alone cost tens of thousands, then that's a pretty big economic limitation on how the technology gets used.
I don't believe robots will have human level walking skills in our lifetime. This is something that looked easy for 70 years. Hans Moravec described why it was harder than it looked. It is possible to look impressive by pouring in more brains and money but unless you have a general purpose breakthrough it can not be useful and economical.
AI vs AGI is well understood in cognitive tasks but tasks that require motion would also require a parallel breakthrough.
> I don't believe robots will have human level walking skills in our lifetime.
If "lifetime" can be considered to be the next 50 years, I absolutely disagree with you. I'd even venture to say that we will see robots with human level walking skills within the next 15-20 years, at most.
I assume you are the famous simone of youtube robot fame. I just speak as outsider looking in. I like robots. It would emancipate society to a new level of existence. I have trouble believing they are real - and have dark ideas about what robots really mean in our society - that they might be a symbol of something like a political belief in a sort of utopia in much the same way the Soviet and Fascist investments in science were not value neutral.
I remember looking at some original robots developed around midcentury in England. They were inexpensive and very bad but did function basic functions.
I look at the Boston Dynamics robots and see these are very expensive robots performing more natural movements.
Let us suppose the BD and similar teams are at the half way point.
To get human level performance at this rate of change means trillions of dollars. This robot would impress us - just as the original English robots and BD robots do. The French Empire invented expensive and difficult to create toys and no robot revolution started. I don't see anything continuous between the idea of a robot and the idea of machine automation - I think that is too much generosity. I know people want to give it because the field is very difficult - but this is not being honest.
The ideal of the robot - people have different ideas about this - but the ideal for me is that there is an economical and effective alternative to human level physical articulation. I'm sure you have more advanced definitions - this is just the basic benchmark. It should be plausible for a robot to sew a thread or squeegee a window with grace.
It is not just human level articulation - it's also generalist application.
General purpose machine articulation looks like a high bar to the point it is difficult to imagine what the world would look like were we to be successful.
107 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread[1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot
[2] https://www.bostondynamics.com/atlas
[3] https://www.agilityrobotics.com/meet-digit
Because of stairs, etc.
But maybe it would
1. allow them to stand
2. allow them to use stairs
I just asked if we could strap people to these things to let them climb stairs, lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT
https://mobiusmobility.com/
I think unfortunately the main reason the iBot did not originally succeed is that it was too expensive.
And, if anything went wrong halfway up the stairs, you'd be going down ass-over-teakettle strapped to something metal weighing more than you.
All those things could be improved on. Maybe Mobius will succeed.
Right now when it's time to carry that heavy desk, couch, piano, etc. through doorways, halls, up/down stairs, etc., two really strong people do it manually.
Imagine if they showed up with a robot that could do it. In addition to walking, it would need to understand gripping and balancing heavy objects and how to orient and maneuver 3D objects through tight 3D spaces, but I bet those things are understood well enough.
Unusual physical strength, or powered mechanical aids, are mostly only used with unusual items. Ex, most "gunsafes" are more properly Residential Security Containers, and aren't all that heavy (~200lbs) and can be moved around, including up stairs, by two average adults. Real safes weigh more like 600lbs and are much more rare, partly due to the difficulty and expense involved in moving them anywhere remotely tricky. I have heard of powered stair climbers being used to lift such things up a flight of stairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6_azdBnAlU
His takeaway was that the big use cases currently are around LIDAR and mapping, e.g. tracking construction progress, in irregular / uneven terrain.
I'm less convinced that walking robots are useful for some of the use cases described in the Economist article, like moving boxes in a warehouse. After all, warehouses are generally built to facilitate wheeled vehicles (forklifts) already...
Legs allow you to climb, ie a ladder, very steep stairs ( more than 45 degrees), a tree, or an extremely steep rough slope (think: mountain).
A tracked vehicle or large-wheeled vehicle can go almost anywhere a legged robot can go with a large efficiency and cost advantage.
However, you can run into space constraints. Bipedal robots are good for navigating human-scale environments while still having a tall and stable robot.
But generally, tracks or big wheels are way cheaper and more efficient and can do the same thing.
but yes, bigger wheels and tracks probably cover a greater percentage of the commercially viable landscape.
also, your point is why i mentioned pearls--not all tissue needs to be activated or enervated similarly, or at all.
we should have no doubt that biology would find a way given enough time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xysbNbvUDZA
Actually, I suggest its for exactly that reason.
Rotary motion is sufficiently more efficient that if there was a way to evolve it, it probably would have.
Rotary motion has lots of difficult issues: how do you power it, how do you communicate with it, how do you lock it in place, how do you reverse it?
None of these are problems for stabilized linear actuators (aka muscles).
legged locomotion has evolved to be quite efficient in certain ways too. human legs, for instance, evolved for walking/jogging long distances efficiently (we have 2 gait-dependent locomotory efficiency points at two different speeds). but we can also climb and run and kick and hop and swim and more when required, unlike rollers.
Unlikely. Something that has the possibility to be so staggeringly more efficient would have found some niche even in present day. At least one spider makes itself into a wheel to roll down sand dunes faster than a predatory wasp can follow.
When something as complicated and calorically expensive as vision can evolve multiple times, the fact that rotary power hasn't evolved says that there is a block somewhere.
And, rotary power has evolved in some flagellar creatures. However, what evolved was a cellular ratchet. The system can go one direction only, and there was effectively no fine control for exactly the reasons I mentioned.
> for a potential analogue/precursor, consider the rotary joints we have in our bodies.
And those joints have complicated musculature and are relatively easy to permanently damage.
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/sn7-zeus
It's the epitome of fitting a solution to a problem. Cooking and cleaning are simple tasks that any able bodied person can do themselves. There is no shortage of able bodied people in the world.
In this case, clothes washing machines and vacuum cleaners seem to fit your thesis.
On a tangent: How was wall-to-wall carpeting cleaned before the invention of the Hoover? Did it just not exist before then? Or it just collected dirt until it was replaced?
Still useful for collecting crumbs around restaurant tables.
Washing machines freeing enormous amount of time for people (particularly mothers, who could use that time to e.g. read books to children or educate themselves) are one example. The other I like is the Reformation: why did Martin Luther succeed where previous attempts at reforming the Church have failed? Because the newly invented printing press allowed for the theses to spread across the Old World much faster than the Church could control it.
Nuclear power was an existential threat to coal mining but was derailed almost completely by manipulating people's beliefs.
The economist Dierdre McCloskey, for instance, argues forcefully that the revolution started with the idea that all souls weigh the same -- i.e., people are all equal under God. [1]
That conviction led to the belief that people should be allowed to read the Bible for themselves, which led to widespread literacy, which led to a demand for books, which allowed the printing press to survive and spread.
After much to-ing and fro-ing I think I'm more inclined to McCloskey's view, that cultural beliefs and values determine institutions, and so determine which technologies survive and which die out.
Of course these things are not one-way. Technology affects beliefs and institutions. But other things do, too, and McCloskey thinks the other things are at least equally as important.
[1] McCloskey D., Bourgeois Equality.
I'd gladly give up houshold chores if it was cheap and wouldn't require a person coming in my home.
I’d buy a robot though.
House chores and maintenance are two big things that are yet to be tackled by technology. They're quite literally life wasters - things you must do in order to get the things you want to do. Prime candidates for automating away, the opposite of "fitting a solution to a problem".
Where I live everyone has a robotic robotic lawn mower.
But cutting out laundry, dishwashing and lawn mowing still leaves some time sinks. Like cooking, where machines currently solve the ingredient prep and the actual cooking parts, but do not help much with cleaning up the mess afterwards (beyond the baseline of using a dishwasher). Or dusting, laundry folding, general cleaning. These tasks I'd wish they could disappear.
And then there's the general category of maintenance - most of the products around us require regular care. Which gets annoying rather quickly.
The tech we have is cool, but there's so much more to be done! I'm hoping the future will eventually bring self-cleaning and self-repairing materials.
Wait... Isn't fitting a solution to a problem exactly the right way to do things?
[#] Mountain-Boting is now a word
Much of this is a mechanical design problem. You need to be able to generate large forces from a small package, but not all the time. Hydraulics can do it, but then you need a big pump and power source, like the older Boston Dynamics machines. Until recently, all-electric didn't have the power density. Now it does. Which is why quadrotor drones work.
Small polyphase permanent magnet motors ("brushless DC") have taken over. The controllers to drive them at variable speed are now cheap. No brushes, no arcing, no magnet demagnetization. The remaining limit on motor power is cooling.
It's too bad Schaft Robotics was liquidated. They were doing well on humanoids. Then Google bought them, trashed them, and dumped the remains. They were into small liquid-cooled motors. That's a way to get huge torques when you need them.
Reduction gears are always a problem. If they're big enough not to snap gear teeth on shock loads, they're too heavy. Better materials for toothed belts have helped. Those have more space to absorb a shock load. Researchers like harmonic drives, because they can put a big reduction in a small package, but harmonic drives are especially vulnerable to broken gear teeth on overload.
Direct drive, without gears or belts, would be nice. The advantage of direct drive is, as someone said a century ago in the context of electric locomotives, "You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field." Washing machine motors are often direct drive today. The electronics is cheaper and more rugged than a gearbox. It's encouraging seeing that happen in a mass-market product.
There's a lot of engineering like that which needs to be done to get mobile robots down to the price of a non-luxury car.
This seems to be a too oft repeated refrain. Google has become such a mire of intra-office politics that being acquired by them is almost a guaranteed death sentence.
They sure fulfilled that contract.
They continued doing this during the war, ... and during the "trial run" holocaust by the German and Austrian Youth Services, then the continuation of that trial run by the psychiatric institutions ... and then with the actual Holocaust. They used a Polish subsidiary, run by a Nazi (owned 90% by IBM), in case you were wondering how they did that without being convicted of treason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The last time I looked into this it didn't look like that much torque was available in a small form factor. I found it rather surprising because larger scale industrial robot arms appear to far exceed any biological arm in both strength and speed.
https://www.halodi.com/ever3
It doesn't need to lift heavy things or do many tasks himself because it could use dumb tools/machines to do that just like humans use forklifts.
That's why I'm saying being smart/ingeligent is more important than how much it can lift or its battery autonomy.
Plenty of core muscles involved.
This means that the force of your fingers is generated by a muscle roughly the size of a cola bottle, the force of your lower arm is generated by between 2 and 3 stacked cans of cola, and the force of your entire arm is generated by a muscle the size of a decent shoebox.
So while muscles are pretty good, they're worse than our best motors. Or at least, if you can provide them with the power they need they are. And you think this is not the case because your body hides pretty sizeable muscles in your torso where everybody thinks you have almost only organs and fat, when in fact about half is muscle.
Most robotic arms I've seen appear to have a motor located at the elbow joint that drives the equivalent of the lower arm either directly or through a gear box.
If cables and pulleys give better torque without loss of speed why aren't they in more widespread use in robotic arms ?
Because it requires more parts, so there's more to break, it's more complex, it loses accuracy, and it fundamentally limits range of motion.
I've seen direct drive SCARA robots with a big pancake direct drive motor on top. Those are used for vertical assembly, for designs where a straight-down move puts the part in place. The arm moves in X and Y, then there's a vertical piston-like actuator that moves in Z, and a rotation axis around Z.
Something that doesn't seem to have caught on is putting tiny cell phone cameras in the end effector, so you can fine-tune positioning.
When you see surgeons, who have loads of theory about precision movements you will quickly find that they rely on feedback rather precision for their movements. For example, they cut along the "linea alba", not by knowing where it is and positioning the knife exactly, but by simply slicing down starting at a good enough position, knowing the knife will follow the linea alba because it's attracted to it. Which is a fancy way of saying that it's a force feedback problem, not a positioning problem.
I can hit a 2mm square target reliably with my an instrument held by my fingers (and my hand resting or held in place) and, say, a 2cm target with my hand. I get that I'm probably not surgeon material, but let's say they can double or triple that accuracy. 10x is out of range of any human without robotic help.
Robots are expected to do that with three numbers behind the decimal point and to keep that position, while carrying their load (varies from 200gr to 20ton). There is no way a human can do that, not even with 200gr, to an accuracy of a centimeter. And even trying will be so stressful you wouldn't be able to hold it for even a minute. A robot can hold it for 10 years.
If a human family member holds something like a baseball bat, or a butcher's knife within arms length of you, you can feel safe around them, and be sure they control their motions.
Contrarily, having an industrial robot with something like a screwdriver at the height of your head and within a meter of distance is just scary.
For instance, if you were replacing a human salary, it might make sense to purchase a hundred-thousand-dollar robot, but if you just want something to pull weeds in your yard once in awhile, it might be hard to justify spending more than a couple thousand. If the parts alone cost tens of thousands, then that's a pretty big economic limitation on how the technology gets used.
AI vs AGI is well understood in cognitive tasks but tasks that require motion would also require a parallel breakthrough.
If "lifetime" can be considered to be the next 50 years, I absolutely disagree with you. I'd even venture to say that we will see robots with human level walking skills within the next 15-20 years, at most.
I remember looking at some original robots developed around midcentury in England. They were inexpensive and very bad but did function basic functions.
I look at the Boston Dynamics robots and see these are very expensive robots performing more natural movements.
Let us suppose the BD and similar teams are at the half way point.
To get human level performance at this rate of change means trillions of dollars. This robot would impress us - just as the original English robots and BD robots do. The French Empire invented expensive and difficult to create toys and no robot revolution started. I don't see anything continuous between the idea of a robot and the idea of machine automation - I think that is too much generosity. I know people want to give it because the field is very difficult - but this is not being honest.
The ideal of the robot - people have different ideas about this - but the ideal for me is that there is an economical and effective alternative to human level physical articulation. I'm sure you have more advanced definitions - this is just the basic benchmark. It should be plausible for a robot to sew a thread or squeegee a window with grace.
It is not just human level articulation - it's also generalist application.
General purpose machine articulation looks like a high bar to the point it is difficult to imagine what the world would look like were we to be successful.
I recommend you check the work of the other Simone out - it is delightful.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ