Why Robotics Is So Hard
Reasons robotics is hard
AI progress is racing ahead, but robots are stuck in demo videos. While AI models like ChatGPT are accessible to everyone, there's no robot equivalent. This post catalogs 15 technical challenges that stand between today's impressive demos and truly capable artificial workers: from replicating the human hand's dexterity and tactile sensitivity, to handling messy real-world environments, learning from limited data, moving at useful speeds, ensuring safety, and simply not breaking down. It's a reality check for anyone expecting humanoid robots to take over physical labor anytime soon.
There is no robot equivalent to ChatGPT – nothing that you or I, or even most people in the AI community, can get our hands on.
- Animats
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.
- GlenTheMachine
Roboticist here. All of this, and he didn’t mention compliance or online adaptation to otherwise un-sensable dynamics. Or massively complex miniature mechanisms.
Current generation tactile sensors cost a couple thousand $ PER FINGER, and have a real world MTBF of hours. The cost can be solved with economy of scale. The fragility is harder.
- kooi
Yes the problem is very hard. Mainly because high DOF generalization is very difficult.
We have self driving cars because what are the control inputs? Pedal, brake, steering wheel. This already took many many years.
Now for a humanoid robot: An action space that is metaphorically Hilbert. (Physically, yes, obviously)
Also, IMO, LLM's can aid the development of robots, but do little beyond a planning, human control interface. Below that it's the domain of control and the solution will be the correct combination of classical, neural, and real time optimization based control.
All the bad-ass biped robots that actually look natural? It's PID controls wrapped with control barrier functions constraining the QPs that are being solved in real time.
But that's annoying to derive per-application. So we'll need neural methods which can be learned (while being constrained by a priori knowledge of dynamics). My hunch is that the Yann LeCunn type of jepa models will be how tasks can be learned.
- YuechenLi
I mean, functional robotics isn't that hard, robotic vacuums have been in homes for a decade now, and industrial robotic arms. However, humanoid robots IS hard mainly because of the form factor constraints. You can't really get a lot of power out of servo motors and other actuator if it all has to be self-contained in a humanoid form instead of using hydraulics or pneumonic or even big stepper motors as for stationary industrial robots.
The videos I've seen of humanoid robot applications are basically that it can do dishes and fold laundry, but I think if household chore robots ever come to market, they would probably not look humanoid at all and probably look like semi dishwashers/washing machines with wheels and a gripper arm.
- akurilin
Couple of related reads/watches to this I found useful recently, with a similar conclusion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUUzmRH5Yi4
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/robot-dexterity-still...