It looks to me like they’re agile enough to do simple housekeeping.
intercst
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Are there any demos of humanoid robots doing useful housekeeping?
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As noted above, I’ll wait until we see a video of a humanoid robot showing significant skills in doing housekeeping. Because a robot having good mastery over its own movements is a necessary, but nowhere near sufficient, condition for being able to do housework. Moving itself around is probably one of the easiest tasks for embodied AI to solve. The robot doesn’t need to interact with anything other than a hard surface (floor or walls), and it’s super-easy for the AI to determine between success and fail conditions.
Let’s see when a robot can clean up an unknown spilled liquid on a countertop using a paper towel and a hitherto unfamiliar bottle of cleaning spray. Because of the way humans work, our heuristic judgments about skill levels lead us to assume that someone that can perform the dance choreography in that video could of course clean off a countertop. Because any human who was able to do the former could do the latter. But for AI, that linkage between skill levels does not exist….
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The video is a truly impressive demo of humanoid robots.
The demo (apart from the robots themselves) is 100% Chinese-themed. No western influence at all. (I watch a lot of Asian media content.) All the weapons and martial arts moves are Chinese. Even the giant robot at the end was dressed in Imperial garments that (in the old days) were reserved for the Imperial family (anyone else wearing them was punished by death).
All the moves are dominated by strength, force and balance. This contrasts with actual housekeeping which is dominated by fine motor coordination – which is why women traditionally keep house. It remains to be seen whether these humanoid robots can master common housekeeping tasks like cooking, putting the wash into the washing machine, sorting and hanging the clothes and putting the appropriate clothes into the dryer (after turning some of them inside out), sweeping, vacuuming and dusting, washing the bathroom appliances, etc. Not to mention sewing. Not to mention “husband” tasks like mowing the lawn, pruning the trees and changing the oil in the vehicles.
An even more delicate and critical task is helping a disabled and/or elderly person out of bed and walking them back and forth to the bathroom, helping them shower, etc. As you know, people are delicate and one mistake could cause injury.
Personally, looking ahead, I would be willing to pay the price of a car for a robot that could make it possible for me to live independently.
I think the variety and delicacy of the tasks are beyond the current development. But given the demographics in China and Japan I’m sure they are working on this.
Wendy
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We look forward to a robot that can button a button, zip a zipper, tie a shoe. I’d settle for a robot that could load and unload a dishwasher.
I think we are a decade away from useful robots in the household.
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That exhibition was very impressive, but the skills displayed were largely movement, not unlike the prior generation of Boston Dynamics robots. They had little to do with dexterity, which is what we mostly need for household or factory.
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bingo bingo bingo!!
Climbing and fighting are gross. Seeing the crucial details of the small tear in one of my finest shirts, and then mending it so as to be invisible…. fuhgidabodit!
Vacuuming and mopping are perfect for robots, but best done by things that have no relation to human bodies. Cooking? Unless you mean opening and dumping boxes and jars into glass bowls and then microwaving, fuhgidabodit again.
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Real cooking involves eggs, no two of which ever break the same way. I can’t wait to see a kick-boxing, dancing, back flipping robot add “2 eggs” to a recipe and not get a shell shard in there 20% of the time.
Of course if by “cooking” we mean “heating a can of Franco American spaghetti” then I will concede, pretty easily done.
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Ummm, I guess I’m a little concerned that we seem to be obsessed with housekeeping robots, while China is clearly more focused on developing karate super robots.
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2 years later it is on a par with drones flying in formation during an air show.
Neither housekeeping robots nor karate super robots are the near term markets. It’s working in factories robots!
- Low risk environment
- Easy supervision environment
- Known financial benefit (replacing human labor)
The Captain
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Factories don’t require breakdancing or parkour either. If this was a video of a humanoid robot deboning a chicken, for example, it would be a vastly more significant indication that robots might be moving into factories. So there’s still no “known financial benefit,” since there isn’t anything in the video showing these things being any closer to replacing the human labor that factories actually use.
It’s also worth noting (again) that factories generally don’t require humanoids in order to mechanize jobs. That’s why the focus on housework. In a household, you can at least make the argument that a humanoid form is an advantage, because the existing environment hasn’t been designed to accommodate machines very well. A factory would easily adapt their space to mechanism, not need the mechanism to have a humanoid form. And doing housework involves being able to switch between different tasks, while factory work more often involves doing the same task over and over again within a larger assembly/manufacturing process - the former possibly making use of a humanoid form, but the latter generally being better suited for a single-use machine.
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I was watching some video on Facebook this morning, since I am a “How’s That Made” fan I get lots of others, grittier stuff from India or other places where the technology (and video making) is not so clean and pure of what actually happens in factories.
And what I noticed is that the robots show never do what humans do. We didn’t make a robot to separate seeds from cotton the way humans do it, we have the cotton gin, which is entirely different. When making vases the machines don’t sculpt the clay the way humans do, they blast it into a form and scrape away the excess. They don’t roll cigarettes like a person does - and that’s why the fastest human can’t hope to compete with the cigarette making machine. We build purpose built robots, and they are vastly superior.
Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things that a humanoid robot will do that nobody has figured out yet: making the bed or emptying a bedpan or whatever, so yeah, there will be some … someday. There will even be a place for them on some assembly lines, probably (although its interesting that after the well publicized “test’ that car factory isn’t clamoring to have them immediately), but my belief is that it’s further away than the evangelists are saying, and possibly even less economically feasible than many think.
(I do expect a rush of “early adopters” when they at last finally arrive for retail sale, it will be interesting to see if the demand continues apace, or stagnates (à la EVs) once that wave passes.)
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Building machines to do a specific task is not a big deal. The ability to program a machine to do a variety of tasks is a plus. A robot that can quickly adapt to changes—ie part out of position or fell over—is an improvement. Ability to quickly learn a new task a likely goal. Self programming when demonstrated how.
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China is deploying the Super Karate Robots as police sidekicks in Shenzhen. (See last paragraph of article.)
intercst
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“it is “almost certainly” an AI-generated video.
The video is in fact labeled as such on on Bilibili, a video platform popular in China where it has also been uploaded.”
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Drones flying in formation is real; it is old hat.
Dancing robots?