Proof of Concept to Test Humanoid Robots

[bandrami]

The human body is sub-optimally designed for most hard work humans do (which is why that work is "hard"). I laugh every time I see AI videos of a human-shaped robot harvesting crops: we have very, very effective crop-harvesting robots right now, and they are shaped like big boxes on wheels because that's a much better shape for doing that.

[XorNot]

Universality matters though. It's less interesting that a hyper specific machine exists for a task than that the same machine might be able to do a wide range of tasks, provided the price point is right.

[dyauspitr]

Those crop harvesting robots can’t do anything else though. They’re also not very good at weeding, or picking berries or tea. Things that require finesse. Also imagine not having to use the god awful amounts of pesticides we currently use. You’ve got to think of these humanoids as universal. You should be able to tell the robot picking weeds to stop and go do the grocery shopping ideally.

[fhub]

The use case claimed here is (a) they can move around (b) they are "universal".

But

(a) Those things look like they need a wide berth to move around and flat terrain

(b) Those end effectors are far from universal. The payload weight seems so low that it even dropped an empty box at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIXjy2GWTg&t=150s

[imtringued]

The weirdest part about the box carrying humanoids is that this problem has already been solved by fork lift style robots [0] which are being sold by many companies. When people talk about universality, having a central warehouse with movable pickup & place locations is all you need. The only thing that would be interesting is to build a universal loader/unloader that can take parts out of the boxes and insert them into machines factorio style, but that loader doesn't need to be humanoid and could instead just be put on a movable cart.

[0] https://www.hairobotics.com/products/haipick-a3

[bandrami]

The bot may be notionally "universal" but will only operate on the DLC you buy from the robot rental company. Want it to wash dishes? That's the $20/mo dishwashing pack, or for one low price you can get the entire housework pack for only $80/mo.

[Barathkanna]

What’s interesting here isn’t the humanoid form factor, it’s the systems integration. Plugging robots into Siemens’ industrial stack means they’re being treated like first-class nodes in existing logistics workflows, not special demos. If humanoids can reuse current automation software, safety models, and ops tooling, that lowers adoption friction a lot. The real question is whether reliability and MTBF get good enough to compete with simpler, non-humanoid automation at scale.

[Animats]

In this use case, the robot autonomously picked totes from a storage stack, transported them to a conveyor, and placed them at the designated pickup point for human operators.

Well, yes, you can use a humanoid robot for that, but there are far simpler robotic solutions. There are lots of systems for handling standardized totes.

[dyauspitr]

Clearly that’s not the point. The end goal is essentially to build a robot that can function as a human slave would in the past.

[dfajgljsldkjag]

I noticed they used the wheeled version for the test, so calling it a humanoid feels like a bit of a reach to me. The speed of sixty boxes an hour seems pretty slow if they want to replace actual people on the line.

[modeless]

What constitutes a "humanoid" robot is a matter of some debate: https://james.darpinian.com/blog/the-humanoid-alignment-char...

[VladVladikoff]

They look so hilariously slow and bad in the video, and it’s a really simple back and forth task, with empty crates.

[metalman]

humanoid robots require an order of magnitude better battery technology that does not exist yet.That technology will change a lot more than just having viable robots