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Comment by adityashankar

8 hours ago

I work in this field, and I wrote my bachelor's thesis here, not with humanoids but with VLAs (think chatgpt connected to a robot arm)

It's certainly not there yet for anything practical, there's also certain bits and structures that don't have accurate names during construction, and it is important to keep that in mind - so a robot is unlikely to understand what it means to say "put the left bit of this box onto this right bit" due to ambiguity, a human would understand that

Plus we have no good reliable accuracy testing data in most cases (most tests occur on a few demos, but that isn't a good representation of how must things work), popular benchmarks, such as libero have been saturated, and nearly everything gets 95% there, most companies and researchers have their own benchmarks here.

Plus companies lie alot, and do very dangerous things in thier videos, I.e. these robots should not be standing very close to humans, because of being dangerous.

There are also legitimate concerns of misuse of these robots that need to be accounted for, misuse does not have to be warfare, but can be as simple as confusing it while it is cutting tomatoes with a knife.

Turning doorknob is easy, and fail recovery is also being worked on, but we don't have reliable statistics anywhere on that. The hard part is on practical things, as in when placing bricks or attaching a part during manufacturing it needs to ensure that it is aligning everything correctly....and that's hard, while it is impressive, it is very irresponsible to keep humanoids at home (people are irresponsible when untrained), for example, lawnmowers injure about 6400 people a year...and that is not an everything machine.

Humanoids in general are...not appealing in specific, due to maintainable of joints, complexity, but robot arms in particular, expecially on wheels (check mobile aloha), are likely to be able to do tasks such as clean up in hotels, after a guest had left, or replace some cooks in restaurants (if their work is consistent)

This is absolutely not true check out Sunday robotics and their robot that folds clothes. Sunday robotics says it does holding of clothes correctly 99% of the time that is real world usage today. They even have three hour video of the robot folding the clothes.