UBTech’s Walker S1 humanoid robot starts real factory work at BYD in China, tackling labour shortages by taking on heavy, repetitive jobs beside humans.
There is a difference between human-scale and humanoid.
Human-scale just means the robot needs to fit in a space where humans should also fit, while humanoid means it is supposed to resemble a humans not just in size, but also in shape. A humanoid robot would generally have a torso, two arms, two legs, and probably a head.
As an example, a roomba fits in a human environment but is not humanoid. You could hypothetically make a humanoid robot that is capable of using an ordinary vacuum to vacuum the same space, but it would be significantly more complex and more expensive to do that. A purpose-built roomba is a much more cost-effective solution for cleaning up after humans.
But what I’m saying is you need a human-scale robot good at moving human scale work pieces to their correct place. These will range in size from something like a screw to something like a human sized sheet
What shape does this better than a humanoid one?
You could specially design a bunch of arms that will remove a workpiece from one station to deliver to the next, but do you have any idea how hard that becomes? You have to design each one to do that specific job, and you’re going to end up with a bunch of unique robots that all need to be maintained, and probably need their own backups in case they break
Everything we make is already human centric, it just does make sense to build humanoid robots. You can have one fleet that handles all of it, they’re interchangable generalists. Ideally, they can even do maintenance
Yes, it’s less efficient. Yes, specialist designs would be better at their job. But it is really, really hard to do full automation, and this is a shortcut to get there
Because the automated tools are human scale
Even if you rework them all to be fully automatic, you still need a human scale robot to move the work pieces from station to station
There is a difference between human-scale and humanoid.
Human-scale just means the robot needs to fit in a space where humans should also fit, while humanoid means it is supposed to resemble a humans not just in size, but also in shape. A humanoid robot would generally have a torso, two arms, two legs, and probably a head.
As an example, a roomba fits in a human environment but is not humanoid. You could hypothetically make a humanoid robot that is capable of using an ordinary vacuum to vacuum the same space, but it would be significantly more complex and more expensive to do that. A purpose-built roomba is a much more cost-effective solution for cleaning up after humans.
I agree with all that
But what I’m saying is you need a human-scale robot good at moving human scale work pieces to their correct place. These will range in size from something like a screw to something like a human sized sheet
What shape does this better than a humanoid one?
You could specially design a bunch of arms that will remove a workpiece from one station to deliver to the next, but do you have any idea how hard that becomes? You have to design each one to do that specific job, and you’re going to end up with a bunch of unique robots that all need to be maintained, and probably need their own backups in case they break
Everything we make is already human centric, it just does make sense to build humanoid robots. You can have one fleet that handles all of it, they’re interchangable generalists. Ideally, they can even do maintenance
Yes, it’s less efficient. Yes, specialist designs would be better at their job. But it is really, really hard to do full automation, and this is a shortcut to get there