Comment by Animats
3 hours ago
A marker of progress will be when Amazon converts to automated picking. They've been trying hard for almost a decade now. They had an annual competition for years. They have a decent picking robot developed in house.[1] It's not being deployed in quantity yet. Nor does it have anything like a humanoid hand. Just a two-surface gripper. Amazon's production robots are mostly automatic guided vehicles, not manipulators.
I'm impressed with how far legged locomotion has come. But as yet, nobody seems to be using legged robots for any commercial purpose beyond the demo level.
Is Tesla still going to produce vast numbers of humanoid robots by the end of 2026?
There's been a lot of progress on the hardware side. Motor technology from drones has produced much better robot motors. The sweet spot on gear reduction seems to have been found. (Too much reduction, and you can't back drive. Too little, and the motors have to be too big.) The volumes are now large enough to justify making robot-specific components. Robot arms are much better than a decade ago. So are robot legs. Control is better, too. It looks like a humanoid robot will cost about as much as a car.
But they're still not quite good enough to be useful.
We'll know they are real when an Amazon Prime truck drives up and a robot does the last 100 meters of the delivery.
That would only be a minor marker. A major marker would be whatever the Chinese equivalent(s) of Amazon are (Alibaba? etc.) going that route successfully. From academic / industrial conference presentations it appears Chinese services are banking on automation far more than an entity like Amazon does.
That being said, I don't know what exact state the industrial automation technology is there and I can only extrapolate (or do websearch, which didn't lead to enough details; I only found things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnUGgc8R3ng).
When something like https://www.allegrohand.com is mass produced and used industrially, I bet the last mile (meter?) would change a bit, and full automation would be easier and less finicky.
Not sure about that. Labor costs are lower in China and the CCP is strongly incentivized to keep enough jobs around for humans to maintain their own hold on power.
The CCP is also well aware that it's facing a dramatic demographic contraction so they better prepare for that.
Labor costs are lower, but rising, and already high enough that automation can be appealing.
The Chinese government is also pretty good at finding things for people to do, so I doubt that's a factor. Go to any big park in a city and see how many people are sweeping up leaves, or guarding a building/area that isn't particularly secure.
Yes, picking is one, and package delivery is another. I wonder how many people currently get package deliveries by robot? It might be a good metric to track?