by haberdasher on 7/23/21, 3:12 PM with 267 comments
by okareaman on 7/23/21, 9:13 PM
Edit: I'm not alone, https://style.mla.org/dont-bury-the-lede/
by i386 on 7/23/21, 9:40 PM
I’m in manufacturing. Machinery is highly specialised. Making a generic robot without taking up huge amount of floor space and/or huge leaps in programming is like… Kubernetes being good for hosting your moms book club blog.
by motohagiography on 7/23/21, 7:16 PM
The leap from an AI model learning how to replicate a behaviour (e.g. evolving walking to solve problems https://unitylist.com/p/2id/walking-ai ) to reasoning about it in terms of actuators and physical feedback, to assembling a physical model out of a relatively small list of parts seems like a solvable engineering problem when it is broken out into a pipeline.
Those robot parts are basically a version of mechano with actuators that a model would map a behavior to, and the robots in the article would assemble them. When you look at something like Lego or Mechano as an intermediate representation to construct buildings out of, where all objects made from it are essentially a directed graph of those elements, robots designing and building robots seems like less than 20 years away.
e.g. we could functionally specify to an ML model, "produce a digraph of these element parts that has these degrees of freedom, and then load or derive a model that solves for this outcome within the domain of those degrees, where outcome is 'plug cables into a board' "
by Animats on 7/23/21, 8:50 PM
Here's much the same job, being done almost 50 years ago, by a robot at the Stanford AI lab.[1] This robot has both vision and force feedback, and uses them to assemble an automotive water pump. It does the coarse alignment visually, and the fine alignment by feel.
by csours on 7/23/21, 7:01 PM
Bonus: the ROI changes as you invest in either bucket.
by yellow_lead on 7/23/21, 7:04 PM
by Vivtek on 7/23/21, 4:30 PM
by jacobmischka on 7/23/21, 9:39 PM
[1]: https://x.company
by allo37 on 7/24/21, 3:15 AM
Maybe with a "software" approach to this we'll see better and more open tools.
by Workaccount2 on 7/23/21, 9:36 PM
This looks like something designed to attract ignorant investors/talent who think small time manufacturing looks like a Ford plant but with less robots and more humans. In reality it looks something closer to Grandma's kitchen on Thanksgiving. How are you gonna stick a robot in there and have Uncle Fred program it?
I can't see this as anything other than a flashy high school engineering project. Much wow! little application.
Source: Work in domestic manufacturing. <$50 million company. Mostly do government/military electronics building.
by nieksand on 7/23/21, 6:32 PM
by amirhirsch on 7/23/21, 7:53 PM
by htrp on 7/23/21, 7:43 PM
Anecdotally, I've heard that FANUCs don't respond well at all to any input deviation.
by nynx on 7/23/21, 4:41 PM
This is a piece of the puzzle of building a machine of machines that can make almost anything without human intervention.
Are they hiring interns?
by jliptzin on 7/23/21, 10:20 PM
by marmada on 7/23/21, 11:02 PM
by aazaa on 7/23/21, 8:31 PM
It's not good that this introductory post doesn't start right off with a problem to be solved. Instead it presents the credentials of the current leader.
If I had to pick out the problem, it would be this sentence, contained in the fourth paragraph:
> Currently just 10 countries manufacture 70% of the world’s goods.
In the fifth paragraph, we get a more clear phrasing of the problem:
> The surprisingly manual and bespoke process of teaching robots how to do things, which hasn’t changed much over the last few decades, is currently a cap on their potential to help more businesses.
Ok, so this is going to be a company that solves the problem of poor usability of industrial robots through machine learning. The larger goal is to put manufacturing capacity closer to consumers for better sustainability.
by falcor84 on 7/23/21, 7:44 PM
Is the implication here that they're aiming to automate away all of these jobs?
by tlhunter on 7/23/21, 4:31 PM
https://twitter.com/intrinsic/status/1164007322932277249?s=1...
by nazrulmum10 on 7/24/21, 6:06 AM
by thesausageking on 7/23/21, 5:50 PM
Moonfruit, launched in 2000, was definitely not the first SaaS website builder. Geocities launched 6 years before it and there were dozens of them by the time Moonfruit came around.
While not a big lie, it's an odd way to start a post like this.
by simsla on 7/23/21, 10:27 PM
I suspect that Dr. Chelsea Finn's work in meta-learning (affiliated with Stanford and GBrain, when I saw it last year) might play a big part here, which is e.a. about generalisation of RL policies to out of domain tasks. (E.g. similar task, but slightly different tools, slightly different task, etc.)
Learning IRL (cameras and actuators) reinforcement learning policies is a huge time sink, so generalisation is a hugely important task. Related solutions can be found in simulation->real generalisation, also an active topic of research.
by xor99 on 7/23/21, 8:15 PM
Hardware and mechanical is like 95% of the problem so there's a need to take the approach of making the machines that make and then add the software on top and developing synthetic task orientated data from that. E.g. the dishwasher, which works because its physically designed for washing plates and then automation was added. The robot arm is a general purpose technology that has been around in the same form since the 60s/70s. There are many options as alternatives (e.g. magnetic assembly or even self-assembly in certain industries) but ofc these are incredibly risky commercially.
I'm aware that this is just the first post and the above is well known in robotics development so excited to see what gets built!
by nodejs_rulez_1 on 7/23/21, 5:45 PM
Well, actually if they do some AI stuff that might be impressive.
I guess stationary robots are seen as less of a reputational risk in comparison with Boston Robotics nighmares.
by lifeisstillgood on 7/23/21, 8:58 PM
There is an old saw about the transition from steam powered factories to electrical power. Initially the large steam engine was in one location, and basically its power was delivered by belts running off one central location. The factories initially tried to replace the steam engine with one big electric motor, and it worked ok but the factory was still a hub and spoke and pieces had to be moved from one spoke to the next.
It was not until a new generation of factories were built with many motors at any point in the factory that the modern line was built.
Of course this is a massive simplification, but I look at two robots using 10 m2 to assemble some Ikea cabinet, and think "awesome geekery" but if you want a factory producing pre-made furniture go back at least three-steps.
Robots that can replace a human arm in the assembly process just feel like we are replacing that big steam engine in the middle of the factory.
And, yes industrial robots is where you start, of course. But a factory can change its process to eliminate the need for a general purpose robot. But the home - that's a different story.
* Take up two "normal" sizes of a washing machine. A hopper accepts clothes, sorts them using RFID tags, and begins a run in a smaller drum, spins, dries and folds them. (yes, its probably magic but this would be on everyone's XMAS list)
* (completely foregoing everything I just said) a mobile robot arm that can learn where each item in a house belongs. 3D tracking, ML etc, and it picks up the toys my kids have left lying around.
* I am not sure where the "robot" vs "process" sits here, but food purchase and prep is a large time sink for many, but there seems to be a viable disintermediation of supermarkets - I mean if i choose a decent set of meals for a week, why send the food to the supermarket so it can use its shelves as a collection point to send it on to me. And if the food is picked so i get "nice meal on Saturday" plus "something with the extra Tues lunch"
I think there is a real possibility of robots making the middle class home like a B&B.
As Jerry Hall said, "My Mother told me if I wanted to keep a man I needed to be a Chef in the Kitchen, a Maid in the living room and a Whore in the bedroom. I said I would hire the first two and take care of the rest myself."
Edit: honestly I am not trying to be HN-negative, and I think all this investment is only going to build better robots. Which is a win. But I remain under-convinced that building general-purpose robots to replace general-purpose humans, when humans are already having the easy bits replaced by specific purpose robots is a good idea - it feels like running uphill.
by fredliu on 7/23/21, 9:39 PM
by baq on 7/23/21, 7:08 PM
by NelsonMinar on 7/23/21, 9:44 PM
by fouc on 7/24/21, 12:34 AM
by robertwt7 on 7/24/21, 3:53 AM
by armatav on 7/23/21, 9:20 PM
by tofuahdude on 7/23/21, 8:21 PM
by xyst on 7/24/21, 6:10 AM
by soheil on 7/23/21, 5:43 PM
by ccchapman on 7/23/21, 7:18 PM
by kevincox on 7/23/21, 5:00 PM
by tus89 on 7/23/21, 8:58 PM
by geodel on 7/23/21, 5:39 PM
by eurasiantiger on 7/23/21, 6:20 PM
Maybe this is an end-use case.