Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
Is anyone building non-humanoid robots? Feels like humanoid is limiting the creativity of building a truly useful robot in today's age
Humanoid robots can be dropped in wherever human labor is currently used.
That makes them extremely easy to sell to industry. This unlocks, in principle, a large chunk of the potential untapped industrial automation market that still relies on human labor because the ROI of redesigning production lines didn't make sense.
These humanoid robots would cost $10-100k to make and would require costly maintenance for them to do the job people in poor countries do for a dollar. I don't say we won't come to it eventually, but not in near future
More realistically it seems that llms in several years could help dramatically decrease costs of automation and make it available for more industries
That's the dream.
It's easier to redesign the work to be robot-friendly than to deploy a humanoid robot and have it actually work.
I don't think it's the dream, I think it's the cynical market-driven logic.
Automation has been rolling out for a long while now, and most of the low-hanging fruit of things that can easily be redesigned in a cost-effective way has been dealt with already. The role of these robots is to address all of the stuff that would have been automated by now if they could have.
ABB, EPSON, FANUC, Kawasaki... Virtually every cars in past 50-60 years have had robots and some form of AI involved in assembly. Some of them already support standard humanoid/dogbot tools in their products.
Humanoid startup execs just don't talk about that.
In the Xiaomi Model Demo, they have non-humanoid robots
https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html