No one is quite sure what you're supposed to do with the robot, but you can buy one.
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Unitree starts selling $16,000 humanoid robot
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OK, so it can respond to kicks & pushes on a level floor in an otherwise empty room. How well does it work on uneven surfaces, floors with various sized objects like furniture & boxes scattered about, sloped floors, etc?
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Can it plant corn or sow switchgrass? I’ve got a brutal back 40 that could be useful if cleared.
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This strikes me as the sort of thing the little kid in 'Silver Spoons' would have owned - flashy, cool, expensive, but useless.
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I'm really struggling to come up with a reason anyone would buy this. Even if we imagine someone so wealthy that the price tag doesn't make an automation non-starter, why are they buying it? It's not useful, it's not particularly entertaining, and the novelty value of it seems like it would be pretty short-lived.
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If it runs ROS this might be a pretty spectacular low cost option for the dedicated tinkerer or small shop that wants to experiment. Clearly comes with at least the base integrations and sensors to get it most of the way to barely useful.
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All you need to add to take practical advantage of that humanoid form factor is half-a-million-dollars worth of offboard compute hardware, a lot more than that in training compute, and a staff of top-drawer experts.
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The video gives me no sense of the capabilities of the vision system, but it's worth remembering that the sensors on the D435 have horizontal FOVs as low as 69-87 degrees, and that the sensor would easily have 30+ ms of latency. This is terrifyingly slow for e.g. a turning robot to notice that it is about to hit a human standing next to it! I hope the early adopters have good health insurance.
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Probably better than me, lately! But that is not high endorsement - said while nursing injuries from my new (apparent) life-hobby of pavement-diving.
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Possible use cases:
- Put one in an Ewok suit and kick it around?
- Program it to dance?
- Pair it up with the robot dog with the flamethrower, and terrorize the neighbors?
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Or buy in bulk and supply software to allow it to learn how to do dishes, fill the dishwasher and put those dishes away in your kitchen. Then resell that smarter robot. I may consider paying that kind of serious money for that.
My question is whether it already has some capability built in or does it have the OS and nothing else? And does it have any AI built in?
Edit: I meant to add moving a step ladder around the kitchen to allow it to put dishes away, and reach the bottom of the sink.
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My guess is that the target market might be militarily use. It doesn’t need functioning hands if you can bolt on a machine gun with a custom triggering mechanism. At that price it would be useful in Ukraine, 2 hour battery is more than enough to storm an enemy position and take out an enemy combatant or two.
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If you wanted a small, survivable ground combat drone for $16,000, it sure wouldn't look like this. I'd make it a tiny tank on treads with a pintle-mounted machine gun and a camera mast. Or, for $1400, you can buy a DJI Mavic 3, rig up a grenade to it, and drop it on some assholes as many times as you can before someone shoots it down. Either way, this is a real silly notion.
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I’d also pay this kind of money if it could be trained to do more and more food prep and even some basic cooking. I don’t know if people are really understanding how much folks would pay to take back parts of their lives with robots doing kitchen work and laundry and all the other chores none of us want to do.
But if I did want to do a bit of cooking I’d love an assistant keeping me on track with multiple tasks on the stove and in the oven.
But if I did want to do a bit of cooking I’d love an assistant keeping me on track with multiple tasks on the stove and in the oven.
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What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
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Holy crap, that promo video nearly did more to tell me what the robot can't do (by obvious omission) than what it can do (by inclusion).
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Hmm, given that this is a Chinese company, I fear the Russians aren't the one's being killed for pennies an hour....
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Overkill for the job, but In a pinch you could use a protocol droid.
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Or just buy a second dishwasher and cut the amount of work in half (no really, all your dirty dishes go in one dishwasher, once it's full, run it and then switch the dishwasher you put dirty dishes in) this removes the "put those dishes away" step from the "fill the dishwasher and put those dishes away" process. There, I saved you half the time you would have saved with a robot like this and at 1/32nd the cost.
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Fine, since no one else is saying it: sex robot. Someone is going to dress one in a human-like suit and program in sex positions
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Continuing my thought on this concept, if I could afford it, I'd redesign my kitchen for the explicit purpose of supporting a robot in it where I could simply ask it for a glass of water or for a refill of my coffee, or to ready a bowl of cereal (or a full-on meal) and it sets that item on "my" side of a counter. Maybe it would be designed in a way where I could get in there myself - maybe because I want to stare in the fridge while deciding what I want for breakfast/lunch/dinner - then I could make it myself or step away and let robo-chef take over.
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That is actually not a bad idea! That is kind of what I tend to do now except w/ dirties in the sink and cleans in the dishwasher. And on that note, in the last home I bought I found that the prior owners had left a couple bags of chips in the dishwasher. (wha?!)
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If I ever want powdered walnuts for some reason, I'd rather spend $10 on a kitchen mallet than $16000 on this.
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What not-adult uses the dishwasher? If you want to keep snacks out of the hands of kids, it seems like an easy place to put them. Worst case you've trained them to empty the dishwasher if there's no room for snack storage.
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Without minimally functional hands, I'm not sure this is even useful as a testbench for very much. That said, making a simulation of one in nvidia's "years of training" system and seeing what it can do with it, would be really interesting.
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All you really got to do is give it three essential skills:
- to hug people.
- recharge through prepared charging stations or by seeking out other sources of electricity.
- stealth, meaning it has enough awareness to know how to conceal itself and only present itself to hug individuals who are by themselves, or groups where everyone will get a hug.
Hm. Someone’s probably already wrote that story, right?
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A plastic robot with the ability to go at a slow walk? I don't think you're storming any Russian position with that unless they think it is so funny that they ROFL. Perhaps strapping a vodka bottle to their 'hand' and getting the troops to drink themselves (deeper) into a stupor. But basically it is a non starter. The battery is likely the most lethal component and that would be to the folks charging it.
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I mean, not to kink shame or anything, but it doesn't look remotely comfortable. 'Hey baby, get up' would give the uncanny valley new meaning.
And let's not even get to the size issue, please.
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Am I the only one who's sure this video is mostly rendered? It's like 1990s CGI at best.
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At least this robot has lidar. Could be an improvement over stock FSD.
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Actually, given the relative sizes, it could possibly use the robot dog as a mount. Imagine one of these things riding in on a robot dog that breathes fire.
[EDIT]Moved my comment outside the post I was quoting.
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