Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.
I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.
> Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video.
Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.
My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.
Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
> Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
BD did most of their locomotion using classical dynamics and control theory until a few years ago. So did Honda, with Asimo. I did some of that in 1994.[1]
Early thinking revolved around landing on the "zero moment point". There's a landing point which, if hit, maintains speed and balance. To speed up, you aim for slightly beyond that point; to slow down, aim for a nearer point. That was Asimo.
You could push that concept to the level of BD's "Big Dog", and later, their smaller dogs. Even pre-calculated flips were possible. But that approach gets you rather clunky motion.
The next step was to use some machine learning to tweak the control system parameters. That works, but you don't get overall coordination of all the joints. That only started to appear as machine learning systems became powerful enough to take on the whole problem at once.
Hard problem. Took over three decades to get decent humanoid control. Now everybody is doing it. You can be too early.
We can kill robots without remorse, and they're likely going to be worse than a human agent at most things for a few years. Not a bad timeline for them to waste their time on.
As insane as American politics is "I can blast robots on my property" has exactly the right amount of crank appeal to be possibly the final 90/10 issue
What if they're private property though? Historically, the state has always valued private property over human lives, so the response could be even more brutal.
That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together.
Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)
But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.
Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.
Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.
It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.
Wiring harnesses seem like the final boss of manufacturing automation. A lot of times they're still built entirely by hand, and also installed by hand.
Automation is really good at assembly of stiff, solid objects. Anything soft and flexible seems too error prone. See also: the garment industry.
