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.
The training data for a lot of robots comes from tele operation so that form factor is going to stay important for some time. And making the whole plant basically wheelchair accessible isn’t worth it for now. There are variants with a wheeled base but once you add in some balancing for heavier objects and kneeling to pick stuff up it’s not much cheaper.
Not only is this inaccurate, it still doesn’t make sense when you’re talking about a bipedal manufacturing robot.
Like motion capture, all you need to capture from remote operation of the unit is the input articulation from the operator, which is then translated into acceptable operation movements on the unit with input from its local sensors. The majority of these things (if using pre-cap operating data) is just trained on iterative scenarios and retrained for major environmental changes. They don’t use tele-operation live because it’s inherently dangerous and takes a lot of the local sensor inputs offline for obvious reasons.
OC is saying what all Robotics Engineers have been saying about these bipedal “PR Bots” for years: the power and effort to simply make these things walk is incredibly inefficient, and makes no sense in a manufacturing setting where they will just be doing repetitive tasks over and over.
Wheels move faster than legs, single purpose mechanisms will be faster and less error-prone, and actuation takes less time to train.
The training data for a lot of robots comes from tele operation so that form factor is going to stay important for some time. And making the whole plant basically wheelchair accessible isn’t worth it for now. There are variants with a wheeled base but once you add in some balancing for heavier objects and kneeling to pick stuff up it’s not much cheaper.
Not only is this inaccurate, it still doesn’t make sense when you’re talking about a bipedal manufacturing robot.
Like motion capture, all you need to capture from remote operation of the unit is the input articulation from the operator, which is then translated into acceptable operation movements on the unit with input from its local sensors. The majority of these things (if using pre-cap operating data) is just trained on iterative scenarios and retrained for major environmental changes. They don’t use tele-operation live because it’s inherently dangerous and takes a lot of the local sensor inputs offline for obvious reasons.
OC is saying what all Robotics Engineers have been saying about these bipedal “PR Bots” for years: the power and effort to simply make these things walk is incredibly inefficient, and makes no sense in a manufacturing setting where they will just be doing repetitive tasks over and over.
Wheels move faster than legs, single purpose mechanisms will be faster and less error-prone, and actuation takes less time to train.