16 ms·

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will ente

by HAL3000 11mo ago

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.

ipnon 11mo ago
Now the question is if this is GPT-2 and we’re a decade away from autonomous androids given some scaling and tweaks, or if autonomous androids is just an extremely hard problem.
- lossolo 11mo ago
  https://www.figure.ai/company https://www.figure.ai/company "Building Figure won’t be an easy win; it will require decades of commitment and ingenuity." "Our focus is on what we can achieve 5, 10, 20+ years from now, not the near-term wins." At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".
  - phatskat 11mo ago
    Musk really missed an opportunity to promise wrecking the govt “next year” - we all would’ve rolled our eyes a la “fully autonomous driving next year” and been eating our hats by now
  - MountDoom 11mo ago
    > At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought. You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins. Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
    - Judgmentality 11mo ago
      > Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make. This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.
      - blackoil 11mo ago
        Most likely you are right. Best way to peddle a lie is to believe it.
      - rishabhaiover 11mo ago
        I’d rather put my faith in his grand illusions than in your sanctimonious high priest pose.
        higginsniggins 11mo ago
        who do you think spins "grand illusions" if not your "high priest" who dosn't even know you exist.
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    - 542354234235 11mo ago
      >Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. They didn't go nowhere; they just didn't result in human-like AI. They gave us lots of breakthroughs, useful basic knowledge, and knowledge infrastructure that could be built off for related and unrelated projects. Plenty of shoot for the moon corporations didn't result in human-like AI either, but also probably did go nowhere, since they were focused on an all or nothing strategy. The ones that do succeed in a moonshot relied on those breakthroughs from decades-long research. I'm not going to get into what Musk has been doing because I'm just not,
- kibwen 11mo ago
  For LLMs, the input is text, and the output is text. By the time of GPT-2, the internet contained enough training data to make training an interesting LLM feasible (as judged by its ability to output convincing text). We are nowhere near the same for autonomous robots, and it's not even funny. To continue to use the internet as an analogy for LLMs, we are pre-DARPANET, pre-ASCII, pre-transistor. We don't even have the sensors that would make safe household humanoid robots possible. Any theater from robot companies about trying to train a neural net based on motion capture is laughably foolish. At the current rate of progress, we are more than decades away.
  - tyre 11mo ago
    I would guess Amazon has a ridiculous amount of access to training data in its warehouses. Video, package sizes, weights, sorting. I’m sure they could pretty easily spin up a site with 200 of these processing packages of most sizes (they have a limited number of standardized package sizes) nonstop. Remove ones that it gets right 99.99% of the time and keep training on the more difficult ones, the move to individual items. Caveat: I have no idea what I’m talking about.
    - eulgro 11mo ago
      A more efficient way might be to train them in simulation. If you simulate a warehouse environment and use that to pre-train a million robots in parallel at 100x real time learning would go much faster. Then you can fine tune on reality for details missed by the simulation environment.
  - blackoil 11mo ago
    McD must be selling millions of burgers every day and cameras are cheap and omnipresent, so should not be difficult to get videos for single type of tasks.
    - kibwen 11mo ago
      There is no reason to employ humanoid robots in industrial environments when it will always be easier and cheaper to adapt the environment to a specialized non-humanoid robot than to adapt robots into humanoid shape. This is true for the same reason that no LLM is ever going to beat Stockfish at chess.
- jcims 11mo ago
  I don't know if I caught your comment in my peripheral vision or what but GPT-2 is exactly where I conceptually placed this. Neural networks for motion control is very clearly resulting in some incredible capability in a relatively short amount of time vs. the more traditional control hierarchies used in something like Boston Dynamics. Look at Unitree's G1 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E It's like an agile idiot, very physically capable but no purpose. The next domain is going to be incorporating goals and intent and short/long term chains of causality into the model, and for that it seems we're presently missing quite a bit usable training data. That will clearly evolve over time, as will the fidelity of simulations that can be used to train the model and the learned experience of deployed robots.
  - robots0only 11mo ago
    Locomotion and manipulation are pretty different. The former we know how to do well -- this is what you see in unitree videos. Manipulation still not so much. This is not at all like GPT-2 because we still don't know what to scale (and even the data to scale is not there).
- hadlock 11mo ago
  This is where I'm at. If you look at Boston Dynamics' first videos, they're 45 second clips of 4 legged robots walking in not even a straight line, just proving they could walk 5 feet over level ground without falling over. The top comment, from 4 years ago is "This was 11 years ago. Now these things are dancing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8 If you can make it look believable on camera for 15 seconds under controlled studio conditions... it's probable you can do it autonomously in 10-15 years. I don't think anyone is going to be casually buying these for their house by this time next year, but it certainly demonstrates what is realistically possible. If they can provably make these things safe, it will have huge implications for in home care in advanced age, where instead of living in an assisted living home at $huge expense for 20+ years, you might be able to live on your own for most of that time. I am cautiously optimistic.
  - gonzobonzo 11mo ago
    The robot (BigDog) in that video shows numerous capabilities that Spot still can't do (climbing over terrain like that, being able to respond to a kick like that, the part on the ice, etc.). Even 16 years later. This only highlights the fact that making a cool prototype do a few cool things on video is far, far easier than making a commercial product that can consistently do these things reliably. It often takes decades to move from the former to the latter. And Figure hasn't even shown us particularly impressive things from its prototypes yet.
    - serf 11mo ago
      It's an unfair comparison. Yes, they're both 4 legged 'dogs', but they use radically different design criteria -- design criteria that the BigDog was used to refine. I'm not surprised that a Honda Civic can't navigate the Dakar Rally route..
robots0only 11mo ago
+100!!! Please don't fall for the HYPE. The current best neural networks only have around 60% success rates for small horizon tasks (think 10-20 seconds e.g. pick up apple). That is why there is so much cut-motions in this video. The future will be awesome but it will take time a lot of research still needs to happen (e.g. robust hands, tactile, how to even collect large scale data, RL).
- brailsafe 11mo ago
  > The future will be awesome Perhaps this is a bit pedantic, but what about the probable eventual proliferation of useful humanoid robots will make the future awesome? What does an awesome future look like compared to today, to you?
  - esafak 11mo ago
    They could do all the back-breaking work. A domestic assistant would be great too.
  - sneak 11mo ago
    Personal trainer. Driver. Valet. Private chef. Security guard. Doorman. Delivery driver. Rough carpentry. Baggage handler. Laundry handler. Janitor. Garbage collector. Pallet loader/unloader. All with much improved privacy, reliability, order of magnitude lower cost, no risk of robbery/SA, etc. 24/7 operation even on holidays. Imagine service staff just sitting waiting for you to need them, always and everywhere. Nevermind how much human lifespan will be freed from the tyranny of these mindless jobs.
  - tim333 11mo ago
    It would be nice to be able to have the robots knock us up a house like the Alhambra place or whatever prefered architecture you have https://s7g10.scene7.com/is/image/barcelo/history-of-the-alhambra_alhambra-background?&&fmt=webp-alpha&qlt=75&wid=2000&fit=crop,1 https://s7g10.scene7.com/is/image/barcelo/history-of-the-alh...
skilled 11mo ago
You wrote what I wanted to write but I couldn't find such words. Indeed, all the videos/examples are marketing pieces. I would love to see a video like this "Logistics"[0] one, that shows this new iteration doing some household tasks. There is no way that it's not clunky and prone to all kinds of accidents and failures. Not that it's a bad thing - it would simply be nice to see. Maybe they will do another video? Would love that. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
tamimio 11mo ago
> Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode As someone who worked in the robotics industry, 90% of the demos and videos are cherry-picked, or even blatantly fake. That's why for any new robot in the market, my criteria is: Can I buy it? If it's affordable and the consumer can buy it and find it useful in day to day life, then this robot is useful and has potential; other than that, it's just an investor money grab PR hype.
wongarsu 11mo ago
The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1]. I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good 1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515 https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago
  > I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.
  - Philip-J-Fry 11mo ago
    I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well. "Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.
    - superpope99 11mo ago
      have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!
      - whartung 11mo ago
guerrilla 11mo ago
No doubt. This video is just to hype investors. I'm sure they have more practical business plans than this.
pizzathyme 11mo ago
How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
- dust42 11mo ago
  > How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U The video shows several of glitches. From the comments: 14:18 the Fall 28:40 the Fall 2 41:23 the Fall 3 Also many of the packages on the left are there throughout the video. But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.
  - tyre 11mo ago
    Three mistakes in an hour isn’t terrible, especially if that’s the last generation. As another commenter put it, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      > this is the worst it’s ever going to be. People keep parroting this line, but it's not a given, especially for such an ill-defined metric as "better". If I ask an LLM how its day was, there's no one right answer. (Users anthropomorphizing the LLM is a given these days, no matter how you may feel about that.)
      - tim333 11mo ago
        Yeah but for things like packets dropped per hour there will probably be improvement.
    - godelski 11mo ago
      I only watched for 5 minutes, at double speed, but I saw a lot more than 3 mistakes fwiw
sheepybloke 11mo ago
It was interesting to see that they didn't show the robot folding laundry; rather, just it laying out the clothes.
- xnyan 11mo ago
  There’s a scene about 2/3 through the first video where they show a brief clip of the robot folding and stacking a shirt. The quality and speed was roughly comparable to a 7-10 year old - slow and somewhat sloppy, but recognizably a folded shirt.
martythemaniak 11mo ago
Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.
- app13 11mo ago
  Most companies are using world model simulations for training nowadays, like Issac Gym or Mujoco, not just video data.
- smath 11mo ago
  came here to see if anyone had read Rodney's recent essay - and to ask how does this announcement by Figure square with Rodney's essay. The essay was long so I cant claim I read it in detail - one q in my mind is whether humanoids need to do dexterity the same way that humans do. yes they dont have skin and tiny receptors but maybe there is another way to develop dexterity?
WanderPanda 11mo ago
I think this is the frontier when it comes to "unstructured": https://youtu.be/nmEy1_75qHk https://youtu.be/nmEy1_75qHk They for sure did not anticipate that the user would backflip into their robot and knock it (and himself) out :D
- someoneontenet 11mo ago
  How did I know this was gonna be speed lol
- kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
  I didn't know Ruby Rhod's great grandfather was already alive.
jayd16 11mo ago
I'd watch that game show.
andrewrn 11mo ago
This is always the case, though. The company is few years old. I'm no disciple of humanoids, but stuff has to start somewhere. Unfortunately hype > truth in order to get funding, so it produces incentives to cherry-pick like this.
Animats 11mo ago
That's the problem. An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking. That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that? It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan. Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise. So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task. Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM [2] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store-robotics/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store... [3] https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-robot-working-independently https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-ro...
- MakeAJiraTicket 11mo ago
  The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...
  - tomcam 11mo ago
    What form factor would be better at going up and down stairs? Reaching to a high shelf? Getting between the refrigerator and counter to grab a key?
  - jjaksic 11mo ago
    Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.
    - seanhunter 11mo ago
aowie 11mo ago
Oh wow, a robot that can play with my dog so I don't have to. That's exactly the kind of task I'd be relieved to automate. The fabric wrap is idiotic. Insanely stupid. Let's have an expensive fabric-covered robot wash dishes covered in food. Genius. It's a good thing those "dirty dishes" were already perfectly clean. I doubt this machine could handle anything more. Put it in a real commercial kitchen and have it scrape oven pans and I'll be impressed. I'm so glad I left robotics. I don't want to have anything to do with this very silly bubble.
deadbabe 11mo ago
This is so damning. How are you not afraid of retribution from big players in the AI space? You pretty much destroyed their company.
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
> There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies …and have a surprise dance-off.
more_corn 11mo ago
I wonder if instead of making a robot to interact with the washing machine we should try to make a washing machine with an input and output hopper. Dump clothing in get clean folded clothing out. You can control the happy path when the whole thing is your box.

by HAL3000 11mo ago

ipnon 11mo ago

Now the question is if this is GPT-2 and we’re a decade away from autonomous androids given some scaling and tweaks, or if autonomous androids is just an extremely hard problem.

lossolo 11mo ago
https://www.figure.ai/company https://www.figure.ai/company "Building Figure won’t be an easy win; it will require decades of commitment and ingenuity." "Our focus is on what we can achieve 5, 10, 20+ years from now, not the near-term wins." At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".
- phatskat 11mo ago
  Musk really missed an opportunity to promise wrecking the govt “next year” - we all would’ve rolled our eyes a la “fully autonomous driving next year” and been eating our hats by now
- MountDoom 11mo ago
  > At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought. You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins. Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
  - Judgmentality 11mo ago
    > Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make. This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.
    - blackoil 11mo ago
      Most likely you are right. Best way to peddle a lie is to believe it.
    - rishabhaiover 11mo ago
      I’d rather put my faith in his grand illusions than in your sanctimonious high priest pose.
      - higginsniggins 11mo ago
        who do you think spins "grand illusions" if not your "high priest" who dosn't even know you exist.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
  - 542354234235 11mo ago
    >Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. They didn't go nowhere; they just didn't result in human-like AI. They gave us lots of breakthroughs, useful basic knowledge, and knowledge infrastructure that could be built off for related and unrelated projects. Plenty of shoot for the moon corporations didn't result in human-like AI either, but also probably did go nowhere, since they were focused on an all or nothing strategy. The ones that do succeed in a moonshot relied on those breakthroughs from decades-long research. I'm not going to get into what Musk has been doing because I'm just not,
kibwen 11mo ago
For LLMs, the input is text, and the output is text. By the time of GPT-2, the internet contained enough training data to make training an interesting LLM feasible (as judged by its ability to output convincing text). We are nowhere near the same for autonomous robots, and it's not even funny. To continue to use the internet as an analogy for LLMs, we are pre-DARPANET, pre-ASCII, pre-transistor. We don't even have the sensors that would make safe household humanoid robots possible. Any theater from robot companies about trying to train a neural net based on motion capture is laughably foolish. At the current rate of progress, we are more than decades away.
- tyre 11mo ago
  I would guess Amazon has a ridiculous amount of access to training data in its warehouses. Video, package sizes, weights, sorting. I’m sure they could pretty easily spin up a site with 200 of these processing packages of most sizes (they have a limited number of standardized package sizes) nonstop. Remove ones that it gets right 99.99% of the time and keep training on the more difficult ones, the move to individual items. Caveat: I have no idea what I’m talking about.
  - eulgro 11mo ago
    A more efficient way might be to train them in simulation. If you simulate a warehouse environment and use that to pre-train a million robots in parallel at 100x real time learning would go much faster. Then you can fine tune on reality for details missed by the simulation environment.
- blackoil 11mo ago
  McD must be selling millions of burgers every day and cameras are cheap and omnipresent, so should not be difficult to get videos for single type of tasks.
  - kibwen 11mo ago
    There is no reason to employ humanoid robots in industrial environments when it will always be easier and cheaper to adapt the environment to a specialized non-humanoid robot than to adapt robots into humanoid shape. This is true for the same reason that no LLM is ever going to beat Stockfish at chess.
jcims 11mo ago
I don't know if I caught your comment in my peripheral vision or what but GPT-2 is exactly where I conceptually placed this. Neural networks for motion control is very clearly resulting in some incredible capability in a relatively short amount of time vs. the more traditional control hierarchies used in something like Boston Dynamics. Look at Unitree's G1 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E It's like an agile idiot, very physically capable but no purpose. The next domain is going to be incorporating goals and intent and short/long term chains of causality into the model, and for that it seems we're presently missing quite a bit usable training data. That will clearly evolve over time, as will the fidelity of simulations that can be used to train the model and the learned experience of deployed robots.
- robots0only 11mo ago
  Locomotion and manipulation are pretty different. The former we know how to do well -- this is what you see in unitree videos. Manipulation still not so much. This is not at all like GPT-2 because we still don't know what to scale (and even the data to scale is not there).
hadlock 11mo ago
This is where I'm at. If you look at Boston Dynamics' first videos, they're 45 second clips of 4 legged robots walking in not even a straight line, just proving they could walk 5 feet over level ground without falling over. The top comment, from 4 years ago is "This was 11 years ago. Now these things are dancing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8 If you can make it look believable on camera for 15 seconds under controlled studio conditions... it's probable you can do it autonomously in 10-15 years. I don't think anyone is going to be casually buying these for their house by this time next year, but it certainly demonstrates what is realistically possible. If they can provably make these things safe, it will have huge implications for in home care in advanced age, where instead of living in an assisted living home at $huge expense for 20+ years, you might be able to live on your own for most of that time. I am cautiously optimistic.
- gonzobonzo 11mo ago
  The robot (BigDog) in that video shows numerous capabilities that Spot still can't do (climbing over terrain like that, being able to respond to a kick like that, the part on the ice, etc.). Even 16 years later. This only highlights the fact that making a cool prototype do a few cool things on video is far, far easier than making a commercial product that can consistently do these things reliably. It often takes decades to move from the former to the latter. And Figure hasn't even shown us particularly impressive things from its prototypes yet.
  - serf 11mo ago
    It's an unfair comparison. Yes, they're both 4 legged 'dogs', but they use radically different design criteria -- design criteria that the BigDog was used to refine. I'm not surprised that a Honda Civic can't navigate the Dakar Rally route..

robots0only 11mo ago

+100!!! Please don't fall for the HYPE. The current best neural networks only have around 60% success rates for small horizon tasks (think 10-20 seconds e.g. pick up apple). That is why there is so much cut-motions in this video. The future will be awesome but it will take time a lot of research still needs to happen (e.g. robust hands, tactile, how to even collect large scale data, RL).

brailsafe 11mo ago
> The future will be awesome Perhaps this is a bit pedantic, but what about the probable eventual proliferation of useful humanoid robots will make the future awesome? What does an awesome future look like compared to today, to you?
- esafak 11mo ago
  They could do all the back-breaking work. A domestic assistant would be great too.
- sneak 11mo ago
  Personal trainer. Driver. Valet. Private chef. Security guard. Doorman. Delivery driver. Rough carpentry. Baggage handler. Laundry handler. Janitor. Garbage collector. Pallet loader/unloader. All with much improved privacy, reliability, order of magnitude lower cost, no risk of robbery/SA, etc. 24/7 operation even on holidays. Imagine service staff just sitting waiting for you to need them, always and everywhere. Nevermind how much human lifespan will be freed from the tyranny of these mindless jobs.
- tim333 11mo ago
  It would be nice to be able to have the robots knock us up a house like the Alhambra place or whatever prefered architecture you have https://s7g10.scene7.com/is/image/barcelo/history-of-the-alhambra_alhambra-background?&&fmt=webp-alpha&qlt=75&wid=2000&fit=crop,1 https://s7g10.scene7.com/is/image/barcelo/history-of-the-alh...

skilled 11mo ago

You wrote what I wanted to write but I couldn't find such words. Indeed, all the videos/examples are marketing pieces. I would love to see a video like this "Logistics"[0] one, that shows this new iteration doing some household tasks. There is no way that it's not clunky and prone to all kinds of accidents and failures. Not that it's a bad thing - it would simply be nice to see. Maybe they will do another video? Would love that. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U

tamimio 11mo ago

> Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode As someone who worked in the robotics industry, 90% of the demos and videos are cherry-picked, or even blatantly fake. That's why for any new robot in the market, my criteria is: Can I buy it? If it's affordable and the consumer can buy it and find it useful in day to day life, then this robot is useful and has potential; other than that, it's just an investor money grab PR hype.

wongarsu 11mo ago

The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1]. I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good 1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515 https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515

aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago
> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.
- Philip-J-Fry 11mo ago
  I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well. "Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.
  - superpope99 11mo ago
    have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!
    - whartung 11mo ago

guerrilla 11mo ago

No doubt. This video is just to hype investors. I'm sure they have more practical business plans than this.

pizzathyme 11mo ago

How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U

dust42 11mo ago
> How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U The video shows several of glitches. From the comments: 14:18 the Fall 28:40 the Fall 2 41:23 the Fall 3 Also many of the packages on the left are there throughout the video. But then I think lots of this can be solved in software and having seen how LLMs have advanced in the last few years, I'd not be surprised to see these robots useful in 5 years.
- tyre 11mo ago
  Three mistakes in an hour isn’t terrible, especially if that’s the last generation. As another commenter put it, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    > this is the worst it’s ever going to be. People keep parroting this line, but it's not a given, especially for such an ill-defined metric as "better". If I ask an LLM how its day was, there's no one right answer. (Users anthropomorphizing the LLM is a given these days, no matter how you may feel about that.)
    - tim333 11mo ago
      Yeah but for things like packets dropped per hour there will probably be improvement.
  - godelski 11mo ago
    I only watched for 5 minutes, at double speed, but I saw a lot more than 3 mistakes fwiw

sheepybloke 11mo ago

It was interesting to see that they didn't show the robot folding laundry; rather, just it laying out the clothes.

xnyan 11mo ago
There’s a scene about 2/3 through the first video where they show a brief clip of the robot folding and stacking a shirt. The quality and speed was roughly comparable to a 7-10 year old - slow and somewhat sloppy, but recognizably a folded shirt.

martythemaniak 11mo ago

Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.

app13 11mo ago
Most companies are using world model simulations for training nowadays, like Issac Gym or Mujoco, not just video data.
smath 11mo ago
came here to see if anyone had read Rodney's recent essay - and to ask how does this announcement by Figure square with Rodney's essay. The essay was long so I cant claim I read it in detail - one q in my mind is whether humanoids need to do dexterity the same way that humans do. yes they dont have skin and tiny receptors but maybe there is another way to develop dexterity?

WanderPanda 11mo ago

I think this is the frontier when it comes to "unstructured": https://youtu.be/nmEy1_75qHk https://youtu.be/nmEy1_75qHk They for sure did not anticipate that the user would backflip into their robot and knock it (and himself) out :D

someoneontenet 11mo ago
How did I know this was gonna be speed lol
kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
I didn't know Ruby Rhod's great grandfather was already alive.

jayd16 11mo ago

I'd watch that game show.

andrewrn 11mo ago

This is always the case, though. The company is few years old. I'm no disciple of humanoids, but stuff has to start somewhere. Unfortunately hype > truth in order to get funding, so it produces incentives to cherry-pick like this.

Animats 11mo ago

That's the problem. An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking. That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that? It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan. Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise. So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task. Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM [2] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store-robotics/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store... [3] https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-robot-working-independently https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-ro...

MakeAJiraTicket 11mo ago
The Telexistence demo isn't so bad, but I have no idea why we're trying to make human robots generally. The human shape sucks at a most things, and we already have people treating roombas and GPT like their boyfriends or pets...
- tomcam 11mo ago
  What form factor would be better at going up and down stairs? Reaching to a high shelf? Getting between the refrigerator and counter to grab a key?
- jjaksic 11mo ago
  Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.
  - seanhunter 11mo ago

aowie 11mo ago

Oh wow, a robot that can play with my dog so I don't have to. That's exactly the kind of task I'd be relieved to automate. The fabric wrap is idiotic. Insanely stupid. Let's have an expensive fabric-covered robot wash dishes covered in food. Genius. It's a good thing those "dirty dishes" were already perfectly clean. I doubt this machine could handle anything more. Put it in a real commercial kitchen and have it scrape oven pans and I'll be impressed. I'm so glad I left robotics. I don't want to have anything to do with this very silly bubble.

deadbabe 11mo ago

This is so damning. How are you not afraid of retribution from big players in the AI space? You pretty much destroyed their company.

JKCalhoun 11mo ago

> There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies …and have a surprise dance-off.

more_corn 11mo ago

I wonder if instead of making a robot to interact with the washing machine we should try to make a washing machine with an input and output hopper. Dump clothing in get clean folded clothing out. You can control the happy path when the whole thing is your box.