We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. Amazon has been trying to automate that for years, with many demos and contests. So far, nothing can quickly and reliably take random products out of one bin and put them in another. Amazon's robotic systems move larger containers and shelves of bins around, but do not yet pick individual items.
show comments
xp84
“Eka, open claw!!!!”
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
show comments
NalNezumi
I have high respect of Tuomas and his work around SAC for RL in robotics.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
show comments
arjie
All my life I've loved robotics, so I was very eager to get things in the house, but my primary problem with humanoid robots is that they're very different from my Roomba-successor Dreame vacuum in a crucial way: they can fall. The Dreame can occupy the same space as my toddler, but the more industrial grade robotics machines cannot. The Unitree Sun Wukong is unbelievably impressive and I could completely imagine a world where it replaces humans in existing dangerous spaces without requiring the spaces themselves retooled. But in my house, perhaps the future will be like what these guys say and I'll have an Eka Claw on my kitchen counter and another by my washing machine, and so on.
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
show comments
notatoad
It seems silly to be talking about a “ChatGPT moment” for a piece of industrial hardware that no regular person will ever have any cause to consider buying.
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
show comments
ofjcihen
I don’t know when this ridiculous melodramatic style of writing started to pervade all of tech but it needs to go away. It’s resurrecting the pain of around 2016 when everyone presented like they were giving their own TED Talk.
show comments
vjvjvjvjghv
I am waiting for a robot that can dust my shelves even when there are things on them. That would improve my life a lot.
show comments
teekert
I can never not think of Howard Wolowitz anymore with such news.
threefour
“Trillions of dollars flow through the human hand,” Agrawal says. “To me, this is the biggest problem in the world to be solved.”
They need to work on their messaging. "Human hands are a problem" is going to make enemies. Perhaps "relieve humans of menial chores" and "take over dangerous jobs" and "enable precision not possible with the human hand" etc.
show comments
gurjeet
A couple of minutes of video (presumably by the author):
I'm not sure I grasp the hype here. It's a few dynamixels screwed together. They're not even particularly good servos.
bethekidyouwant
Call me when it can tie a shoelace.
tuatoru
The robotics Turing test: change the nappies of the designer's and company owners' baby daughters or grand-daughters.
show comments
martythemaniak
Rodney Brooks has a great essay on why he's skeptical that the current humanoid hype will deliver and the central claim is that human dexterity is extremely advanced any today's humanoids lack even the sensors and data needed to start building the models needed to match human performance.
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
show comments
NDlurker
Mount 2 of these on a Segway and I can think of several tasks that could be automated where I work.
everyone
"a ChatGPT moment" doesnt seem very momentous. ChatGPT was surprisingly good compared to previous smaller models. But since then the LLM scene has just been insane amounts of hype and bullshit and financial skulduggery. Their actual utility is pretty niche imo.
SpyCoder77
If Figure acquires Eka they are so winning the humanoid race.
chrisweekly
Anyone else here have happy memories of playing with Armatron? Circa 1984?
show comments
HardCodedBias
This one is different? What about unitree? What about their demo at the Spring Festival Gala?
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
show comments
jfengel
Back in the 90s, I developed a rule of thumb: if I saw it in Wired, it's because it was either already over, or it wasn't going to happen at all.
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
just because it's an article about techie stuff doesn't mean all the photojournalism has to be color-graded like a Matrix movie.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. Amazon has been trying to automate that for years, with many demos and contests. So far, nothing can quickly and reliably take random products out of one bin and put them in another. Amazon's robotic systems move larger containers and shelves of bins around, but do not yet pick individual items.
“Eka, open claw!!!!”
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
I have high respect of Tuomas and his work around SAC for RL in robotics.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
All my life I've loved robotics, so I was very eager to get things in the house, but my primary problem with humanoid robots is that they're very different from my Roomba-successor Dreame vacuum in a crucial way: they can fall. The Dreame can occupy the same space as my toddler, but the more industrial grade robotics machines cannot. The Unitree Sun Wukong is unbelievably impressive and I could completely imagine a world where it replaces humans in existing dangerous spaces without requiring the spaces themselves retooled. But in my house, perhaps the future will be like what these guys say and I'll have an Eka Claw on my kitchen counter and another by my washing machine, and so on.
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
It seems silly to be talking about a “ChatGPT moment” for a piece of industrial hardware that no regular person will ever have any cause to consider buying.
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
I don’t know when this ridiculous melodramatic style of writing started to pervade all of tech but it needs to go away. It’s resurrecting the pain of around 2016 when everyone presented like they were giving their own TED Talk.
I am waiting for a robot that can dust my shelves even when there are things on them. That would improve my life a lot.
I can never not think of Howard Wolowitz anymore with such news.
“Trillions of dollars flow through the human hand,” Agrawal says. “To me, this is the biggest problem in the world to be solved.”
They need to work on their messaging. "Human hands are a problem" is going to make enemies. Perhaps "relieve humans of menial chores" and "take over dangerous jobs" and "enable precision not possible with the human hand" etc.
A couple of minutes of video (presumably by the author):
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/this-company-is-building-s...
I'm not sure I grasp the hype here. It's a few dynamixels screwed together. They're not even particularly good servos.
Call me when it can tie a shoelace.
The robotics Turing test: change the nappies of the designer's and company owners' baby daughters or grand-daughters.
Rodney Brooks has a great essay on why he's skeptical that the current humanoid hype will deliver and the central claim is that human dexterity is extremely advanced any today's humanoids lack even the sensors and data needed to start building the models needed to match human performance.
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
Mount 2 of these on a Segway and I can think of several tasks that could be automated where I work.
"a ChatGPT moment" doesnt seem very momentous. ChatGPT was surprisingly good compared to previous smaller models. But since then the LLM scene has just been insane amounts of hype and bullshit and financial skulduggery. Their actual utility is pretty niche imo.
If Figure acquires Eka they are so winning the humanoid race.
Anyone else here have happy memories of playing with Armatron? Circa 1984?
This one is different? What about unitree? What about their demo at the Spring Festival Gala?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykiuz1ZdGBc
That sure felt "different".
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
Back in the 90s, I developed a rule of thumb: if I saw it in Wired, it's because it was either already over, or it wasn't going to happen at all.
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Do they mean, the moment when everyone realizes it's not as useful as they at first thought?
> Companies pay people to spend hours doing routine tasks with their hands while wearing cameras and motion-capture gloves.
Dystopian. Which companies out of interest?
no paywall: https://archive.is/Wro1e
just because it's an article about techie stuff doesn't mean all the photojournalism has to be color-graded like a Matrix movie.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
see : two startled victims under a blue arctic sun - https://media.wired.com/photos/69f11cbf1b1015e12f65d23e/mast...
> a ChatGPT moment for the physical world.
That's not a good thing, WIRED.