i cant stop thinking about the tesla bot. was he he outright lying? is it just a ploy to recruit robotics people? is it even plausible?
i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects.
its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting for things like other moving objects. boston dynamics has built machines that take the input of a joystick and translate that into four-legged locomotion. so if you just took FSD and bolted that on top of a spot or atlas, you would have a machine that gets you a very long way towards tesla bot. something that can walk and navigate by itself. so the question is whether or not tesla will be able to recreate what boston dynamics has done and whether or not they could do that on the time-scale that was insinuated by musk. the last time i checked, boston dynamics does not use any NN in their robots.
and then theres the question of interacting with the world. i think its a fair assumption based on ai day that fsd would be able to create a very rich and accurate map of its surroundings. so that half of the question is taken care of. but how could they get it to grasp a drill and manipulate it in an intelligent way? the implication is that they would train a NN to provide that signal. but how are you going to train that? they have thousands of cars out in the world generating tons of driving data. where are they going to get data for performing these tasks? are you going to train it on every task that might be asked of it? its hypothetically possible but thats hard data to generate and label. it would take a really long time at best, and even then it would be an experiment, just as likely to fail as succeed.
it seems to me that this must be a stunt where the intention is to build something that can walk around but not manipulate things or do anything useful. i would change my mind if musk came out with an explanation of how hes going to train interaction.
The last commercial anthropomorphic was the Willow Garage PR2 back in 2010. It weighed 600 pounds, and had a wheeled base. Each arm had a max payload of 4 pounds. It cost $250,000. The company went bankrupt because there wasn't anything you could do with it.
The tesla bot is supposed to be bipedal, only weigh 125 pounds, and have a "arm extend lift" of 10 lbs. Is that per arm, or both together? Even BD Atlas weighs 196 pounds, and it doesn't have hands!
Like, any one of their numbers would be exceptional. All together, and you are definitely sacrificing something. Either onboard compute is minimal, or it has a battery life measured in dozens of minutes. Something.
They claim a deadlift of 150 lbs. I don't want to say "impossible!", but... difficult? Just holding 150 lbs with any of the robotic hands you can buy on the market today would be hard or impossible.
None of the five finger hands today are as compact as shown in the concept renders. If it does ship with a five finger hand, (stupid, pointlessly expensive) the forearms would be far bulkier. An easy bet is that the first gen will ship with a three finger gripper.
That is, if it even ships at all. BD Handle is a much better design for a humanoid-ish industrial robot. It's going to be simpler, faster and lighter for the same payload as this hypothetical Tesla bot.
i think this comment illuminates the issue. seems like an industry veteran (unconfirmed) thinks having the thing walking around is plausible but is confused about interaction.
Even assuming the robot existed, which it doesn't, (Maaaaybe it was tethered, so it didn't have to carry around batteries and a hydraulic pump) I'm quailing at the task of programming the thing. To match human performance would be decades of work for thousands of programmers.
(The robot picks up a screwdriver, and a screw. Then the screw slips out of its fingers. Now what? It lines up the screw and the screwdriver. It applies torque. The head of the screw strips out. Now what? The pain of robotics is that you need to cover each and every little error case, because if you don't, the damn thing doesn't work, because it has no brain! This is why every industrial robot is massively overbuilt, and it's environment and fixturing is carefully simplified and fenced off, because error handling is such a pain in the real world, where a dropped item bounces away and hides under a bench or in an orientation where your gripper can't pick it up. 1 in 1000 is too high of an error rate. 1 in 10000 is too much. It has to function perfectly, every time, every grasp.)
And the maintenance costs! Mechanical humanoid hands are terrible end effectors. All little moving parts and lousy tolerances. They would need constant repair and replacement. It couldn't possibly be cheaper than a human in 2021 or 2030.
> Either onboard compute is minimal, or it has a battery life measured in dozens of minutes.
For industrial applications you could probably have some sort of novel power system, like a tether from the ceiling or special floor that delivers power through the feet.
Haha, don't know where the downvotes are coming from, this is the absolute truth right here.
He knows the world idolizes him as a slightly eccentric genius engineer with a heart of gold, and I think there's probably some truth in that, even. Nevertheless, if you are smart enough to be a good engineer, it doesn't take much to realize that you can greatly expand your aura by occasionally trolling people with something stupid just to see if you can get away with it. The fans will adore him more, the critics will pounce, but the net result is more exposure, and more exposure gets investment money. Rinse, repeat.
Personally, I think one of the smarter touches is to release/leak information that looks bad shortly before releasing information saying that the problem was overcome. This constantly reinforces the impression that anything Musk-related is always overcoming impossible odds. "Andrej didn't think we could do it, what do you think now, Andrej?" "The Starlink terminal costs $2400, but just a few months later, it costs $1000!"
yes im aware. that thread is a day old and probably quite dead. i post here because i am interested to read peoples responses. and its certainly related since tesla bot will use fsd and be trained on the hardware discussed in the article.
to be honest FSD seems to be coming along albeit behind schedule. ive watched videos of the fsd beta and it is the closest thing ive ever seen to a car driving itself in an uncontrolled environment. i wonder what you make of dirty teslas latest driving video on youtube?
I find it some what odd that you don't consider Waymos taxi service to be in an uncontrolled environment. Yes, it is an incredible well mapped environment but so are the highways Tesla drive on.
listen im trying to be objective about this but i cant help but point out that fsd is navigating crowded intersections, crowded downtown areas and roads without lane markers. ive seen videos of it
i dont know why people downvote the shit out of me whatever i post. it seems like HN has become a cesspit of idiots... anyway i was very interested to see my comment validated by this guy
I don't know about cesspits & idiots, but a little smell can develop that does tend to bring the intellectual level toward the below-average rather than above.
For those that want to push downward, the present system highly leverages their ability to do so simply through the process or habit of frequent downvoting.
If there is any perception that there was a time when there was very little detectable smell by comparison, it would be good to assess the average downvote-per-user rate then, and compare it to today's figure.
Then measure each user along this scale, perhaps including a time component, or relative to activity in some way.
Allowing for a reasonable standard deviation, it might be better if frequent downvoters past a certain range had the weight of each downvote normalized and see what happens.
This could possibly also be tuned to achieve a target level of discourse relative to a previously-considered-desirable data point in time.
Alternatively, users alone appear theoretically able to overcome the issue if there was a widespread concerted or random effort to frequently upvote the comments or postings seen descending, whether fully deserved or not, keeping them at least neutral without having a negative effect on the commenter's rating.
Mathematically a small uptick in "compensatory upvoting" habits among average users could bring the target way up as long as the overly-frequent downvoters are in the vast minority.
Then when there is true downward consensus it will still always drop through, but those who participate mainly to downvote will have less negative impact.
The only thing worse than the "nattering nabobs of negativity" are the non-nattering nabobs of even worse negativity.
i think the most challenging aspect of the idea is interacting with the world, picking up and handling various objects.
its obvious from the presentation that fsd is very good at placing itself in space and mapping out its environment as well as devising routes even when accounting for things like other moving objects. boston dynamics has built machines that take the input of a joystick and translate that into four-legged locomotion. so if you just took FSD and bolted that on top of a spot or atlas, you would have a machine that gets you a very long way towards tesla bot. something that can walk and navigate by itself. so the question is whether or not tesla will be able to recreate what boston dynamics has done and whether or not they could do that on the time-scale that was insinuated by musk. the last time i checked, boston dynamics does not use any NN in their robots.
and then theres the question of interacting with the world. i think its a fair assumption based on ai day that fsd would be able to create a very rich and accurate map of its surroundings. so that half of the question is taken care of. but how could they get it to grasp a drill and manipulate it in an intelligent way? the implication is that they would train a NN to provide that signal. but how are you going to train that? they have thousands of cars out in the world generating tons of driving data. where are they going to get data for performing these tasks? are you going to train it on every task that might be asked of it? its hypothetically possible but thats hard data to generate and label. it would take a really long time at best, and even then it would be an experiment, just as likely to fail as succeed.
it seems to me that this must be a stunt where the intention is to build something that can walk around but not manipulate things or do anything useful. i would change my mind if musk came out with an explanation of how hes going to train interaction.