Technology

I notice that as well, some of the movements just seem awkward. Interestingly, this has been the case for a long time too now. Once in a while you see very fluid motion from Boston Dynamics or UniTree, but it's always in demos where it's mostly scripted. Whenever you see robots operating in the wild it's always very slow and stuttered motion. I'm guessing the control systems are just not reliable enough to guarantee that the robot recover from losing balance, and it makes sense to just have them work slow and steady with minimal risk of accidents. I also expect that as the use of such robots becomes more prevalent, control systems will improve as well and they will be able to move similarly to humans.

Another aspect of it is sensors. Humans have skin, and we can immediately tell when we come in contact with an object. It's a trickier problem for a robot though since they mostly rely on visual or lidar data. I expect artificial skin and proprioception likely to be the next big innovations in robotics. If a robot is able to know the position of its body relative to the environment with a high degree of confidence, and able to sense the environment with its body, then it can move a lot more safely and reliably.

The appeal is that it's a single robot that can do many different tasks based on the need, and directly work in spaced designed for humans. It's the universality of it that's the real benefit. With industrial robots, you have to design a robot for each specific task, and then it can only do that one task. This makes sense for factories that build a specific type of thing, and it's more efficient in that context. However, if you want a tool that can do many different tasks, then a humanoid design makes a lot of sense.

And now that the cost of these robots is becoming very cheap, I think UniTree sells them for something like 18k now, it's cheaper to just grab one of these general purpose robots and get it to do what you want than to design one from scratch.

I guess it's because humanoid robots can work in the for-humans facilities we already have while other types of robots would necessitate the facilities to be heavily modified or redone to be able to work in them. Also, if the robots fail they can get humans to fill in instead of having to stop production until the problem is fixed.

Yeah, I've been wondering this as well. It makes so little sense but I'm guessing it just makes for shiny propaganda. I was never convinced by the argument that "Humanoid robots are better suited to working in environments that were built for humans", like, WE are the ones who make these environments, wouldn't it just make more sense to rebuild the facility to be more efficient for cheaper and more sensible machinery, rather than invest exponentially more to replace all the humans with robots?

It's like saying "Cars were designed with humans in mind, so if we want self driving cars we need to put a humanoid robot driver in the drivers seat".