I wonder: Is the task of automating this work primaryly difficult in vision or dexterity (motion)? Or maybe they are equally difficult for different reasons.
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
I've seen multiple articles about robotic claws. This one made the rounds previously https://www.firgelli.com/pages/humanoid-robot-actuators
As someone who comes from the world of running and knee problems, I feel this misses the issue. Normal walking should not produce these kinds of shocks unless your gait is really jumpy or otherwise screwed up. You only start to see these forces when running and that's where technique becomes important even for humans if you want to prevent damage to your joints over long distances. But at least for walking I suppose that a fully articulated humanoid with all the degrees of freedom of human gait should be mostly a control problem, not a mechanical engineering one.
Slow deceleration leads to low forces. If you have a contact event with a hard substance, like a rigid metal for accurate kinematics, the deceleration to zero upon a contact has to happen instantly. Meaning the deceleration is incredibly high, resulting in extremely high forces for a few milliseconds.
Human bodies are made out of a flexible and impact resistant material: water. When a contact event happens, your body deforms, which means that the deceleration happens over a longer time frame with less force. Not just that, your muscles also have a certain amount of flexibility in them and basically zero internal inertia. All the inertia is in the limb as a whole, whereas for a robot there is a spinning motor and gearbox that needs to slow down as well.
You could solve this as a control problem by adding series elastic actuators, which means you need to change your mechanical design.
Imagine when you throw a tennis ball high in the sky, and then you catch it on your racket without bouncing by matching it's velocity, your feet do the same thing with the ground on a smaller scale.
Nobody actually runs perfectly enough to take 100% of the impact out of your joints but good form routes as much as possible into the muscles/ligaments around the joints instead of straight through them. It's a lot of little bitty unconscious nerve endings and muscles so one could expect it will take a while to iron out for robots.
Thinking about it more, maybe the issue here is that there's no self-healing stretchy ligaments involved in robots to begin with, even before the control issue.
That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.
I work at a biotech. We spent who knows how much time and money trying to develop a 'lab technician bot' to automate one of our critical assays. Turns out, a 6-figure machine still isn't as economical as my coworker Y, one of the veteran lab-technicians. Sure she takes the occasional sick day but even at our volume (and we do industrial-level, multiple clients batched into a single assay pass) it won't be economical to replace her for a very long time (if we even reach that scale).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250919140427/https://nanoporet...
If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
People see a robot arm attached to a stationary platform and understand it requires integration work to perform a single task.
But when those same people see a humanoid robot, they think they can just talk to it like a real human and it will do what you told it to do.
They don't think about the fact that the humanoid robot has to be programmed exactly the same way the stationary robot arm has to be programmed and that programming the legs in addition to the arms is a much more challenging problem.
In Manhattan in 1900, 400 horses would die a day, and a rotting horse carcass is a far bigger sanitation problem than a broken down car, which you can tow and fix up.
But picking arbitrary objects from fulfillment bins is still running at a few picks per minute.[2] As the speed picks up, humans become less necessary.
The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.
Your last point is also interesting given perhaps a robot is more amenable to such instruction, thus creating cascading savings. Each human has to be trained, and could be individually a failure. Robot can essentially copy its "brain" to its others.
Or likely more accurately, download the latest brain trained from all the robot's aggregate experiences from the amazon hivemind hq
> when I can pay people from the third world
We have seen lab demoes of robotic manipulation for decades. The reason why they stay in the lab (when they do) and don’t become ubiquitous is because they are not good enough. In other words they don’t work. The economics and “does it work” is not two separate concerns but one and the same.
I'd say that we'll know it works when robots with those hands start turning out on the Russo-Ukrainian frontline en masse, because it is there where the lack of manpower has the most pressing and brutal consequences, and cannot be mitigated by usual peacetime incentives (e.g. better benefits).
That frontline has already sucked in all the automatization innovations of the last decade, as long as they proved themselves in combat.
What would a clawed robot be able to accomplish that can't be done by a flying drone or unmanned wheeled vehicle?
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
The article describes multiple demos. Are you referring to the chicken nuggets one? That sounded pretty impressive to me. Is there publicly available videos of this?
As for chicken nugget here's for example one (company) showing same capacity 4 years ago
https://youtu.be/6SbpfN5ed38?si=srtdZCdKOdPZ_wRn
They today have similar system that can quickly sort dumplings (more sensitive than chicken nuggets) ob conveyor belt.
No sim2real even needed. That haptics sensor is dirtcheap; camera based haptics sensor are today even available as open-source hardware that you can assemble for cheap.
If we don't limit to company demos we can dig up demos from I think almost a decade ago, and at least ~5 years ago for company demos.
>I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware.
The simplest solution sometimes is more robust in practice:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/balloon-filled-ground-coffee...
Too many edge-case failure modes in an uncontrolled setting. Building platforms that could seriously harm people by just falling over is an inherent design risk. =3
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
And another that I can just drop all my clothes in, and have them washed and ironed for me.
Doesn't have to be a humanoid.
> In 1971, the original Thermomix VM 2000 was launched on the market – first in France, later in Spain and Italy.
The question is do they fall and can't get back up
The main issue is how heavy duty they are, because they operate on lithium batteries you can't make them too heavy otherwise it burns battery. So these humanoid robots durability will be closely aligned with innovation in lithium battery tech, or having larger and expensive robots with lots of battery.
We don't leave our young toddlers to roam freely around the house for a reason. Our homes are full of hazards to these risk-seeking small people and a robot is just one more on the list.
I don’t want to say home robotics will never happen since it seems likely eventually it will. But I think the deployment will be much much slower than entirely software based products like ChatGPT.
now that I think about it I can only remember videos of people doing really stupid things with them, then being surprised by really bad results, but never heard about any of them endangering anyone during normal operation
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens.
Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present.
In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.
It's been 10 years since Boston Dynamics released this impressive video of Atlas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
Even though today's robots are vastly more sophisticated, the progress of the last decade shows we shouldn't expect a sudden revolution in their abilities over the next ten years. As is often the case, solving those final few challenges that really make a difference always takes the longest.
Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them. The internet was tiny, then everywhere. Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them. GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them.
This is how things playout time and time again.
Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.
Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.
I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.
I’ve only ever seen them performing choreographed routines or running races.
I’ve yet to see one doing something useful, so if you know of an example, I’d love to see it.
How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.
And yet we haven’t seen widespread adoption because they can’t handle stairs, steep slopes, streets without sidewalks, sidewalks with mud, or a hundred other real world challenges
So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.
A euphemism in polite company for: we'll ban them on national security grounds like we did with cars and phones.
If not connected they can be used for numerous criminal activities. Stealing, selling drugs on the streets, etc. Armed robberies will be impressive.
So, my guess is robots will be connected, and this will be enforced in software and, may be, hardware. To the point that makes them almost unhackable. However it should be possible to take the frame and low level electronics (like motor controllers), and fit it with custom high level compute module and software. It will be just quite a lot of work. Still can be done by community of enthusiasts.
No, there won't be, and I have no clue why you think this is true. It's been more than 15 years since the first demos of self-driving cars, a much easier problem than useful bipedal robots coexisting in spaces made for humans, and self-driving cars are still hardly anywhere, despite the breathless predictions 15 years ago that all cars and trucks everywhere would be self-driving as of what is now 5 years ago.
One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.
Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control.
Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.
Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.
Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.
Yeah. I don't see how this is going to be a ChatGPT moment. Robot arms aren't a crazy new product. It might be big news regardless.
I don't understand these frantic money people, but I do understand if you can figure out how to not be the greater fool you can make a lot of money. Seems kinda dumb this is how innovation is funded.
They need to work on their messaging. "Human hands are a problem" is going to make enemies. Perhaps "relieve humans of menial chores" and "take over dangerous jobs" and "enable precision not possible with the human hand" etc.
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/this-company-is-building-s...
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798
The first phase is likely don't let the kids go near it since it could easily hurt a human by accident.
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.
My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.
If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.
That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.
Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.
Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.
A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.
That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.
And why don't I have any sense of pressure at all? We can put that into robots.
Having said that, I've probably hit my head on the underside of an open cupboard door five or six times in my life, and I expect to do it again.
A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."
I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.
So if you're seeing anything that actually seems to merit attention, I'd love a few pointers. I could use some good news.
Right now, only a human can both push over a boulder and pick up a tiny speck from the floor using the same actuator.
Just a few weeks ago at work we got a Universal Robots UR5 from another project in-house along with a Hand-E gripper.
I've never had so much fun programming and playing with a device ever. And it completely took me back to getting an Armatron 40 years ago and having so much fun - but also wishing I could somehow control it with software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykiuz1ZdGBc
That sure felt "different".
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
(That's not true of all Chinese companies - some are doing really impressive work with closed loop systems in unpredictable environments. But many of the highly viewed ones with coordinated dance performances or martial arts are intended more as theater to government financial sponsors than useful function. The technically impressive performances do not look as visually impressive.)
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
Stop using it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.
I think the attack was itself a response to a doxxing attempt. Also, archive.is being a free service doesn't quite fit with claiming they are malicious. The overall picture seems still positive.
If, when I visit your site, your site causes my browser to participate in a DDoS attack without my knowledge, your site is malicious.
Dystopian. Which companies out of interest?
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
see : two startled victims under a blue arctic sun - https://media.wired.com/photos/69f11cbf1b1015e12f65d23e/mast...
That's not a good thing, WIRED.
Basically, I want a robotic butler / maid that will do most of the cleanup around the house.
I'd rather do my own cleanup, personally.
Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.
* Phones * Cars * Robotic Vacuums * Kitchen Appliances * Televisions * Home Lighting * Home security systems, doorbells, and locks * Web browsers * Operating Systems
So, uh, yeah, I'm pretty confident users will settle for that in robots too.
1. a human child learning 6 algorithms and a weekend can solve a Rubik's Cube
2. Reenforcement learning can solve a Rubik's Cube
3. The best LLM model using recursive tuning or not can't solve a Rubik's Cube.
Claude 4.6 got 60% of the way but couldn't figure out the last steps after running for 20+ minutes and hundreds of thousands of tokens.
I'm stating that LLM models are not capable of predicting the consequences of their actions which makes in inept with spacial and temporal understanding of the environment state.
I like the Rubik's Cube because it is a harness that helps me try to develop a prompt to get reasoning models to reason about the consequence of an action.
God we are a horrible species.
