Apptronik has been around for 7 years. They are looking to make a $50,000 humanoid bot.
There robot has hands and they have actuator development.
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Hey, if he, she, it, looks cute, (that’s sweet) but does it know how to make a great cup of coffee? If our robots can’t do things we all take for granted, then we have a problem. It doesn’t matter if they look like us, It has to know how and why WE do act, and to act in a similar way. Not because it’s programing can only force it to do certain things. But to understand the following:
What’s the difference between making a cup of coffee for any person, and making a really GOOD cup of coffee for any INDIVIDUAL human being? You need to know who your making that coffee for, to make a GREAT cup of coffee… I’d love to see a robot figure that out. Love to see one try. I do love a good cup of coffee. And I would never discriminate as to who, or what gives one to me. But do I think our current technology can know what my “perfect” cup of coffee is?
Sorry gang, not yet. I am hopeful, but not holding my breath. (We are only talking about coffee here, so why get so worked up?) Because what we’re talking about is so much more important as to it’s consequences. This is so much more important then my AI robot getting my coffee, just right…
Its kind of interesting how the meme-expectation of Humanity continues to evidence itself in The Bot Wars. They have “heads”. Roundish, kind-of-humanoid-ish, heads.
Mother Nature determined of course that “a head” was a good spot to put the eyes and the energy gathering apparatus … the nose, mouth, etc. The brain, being wet-ware, needed to be pretty close to the eyes-and-ears especially, being pretty bandwidth hampered by the length of nerves. A robot’s “brain” could well be in the torso, or buttocks, or even the next building over, being limited by the speed-of-light and curiously tricky high-bandwidth radio protocols. Seriously … proximity to the eyes is not a priority.
Léts say that “stereo vision” has lots of Darwinian-proved advantages over monocular video streams. It seems to, as all animals from the most primitive to us naked apes have stereo vision, and stereo hearing. Some animals seem to have well developed stereo olfactory (smell) organs. And of course, being bipedal, we’ve got stereo symmetry in our bodies and legs, arms, all that.
Anyway, perhaps it would be a perfectly Digital Darwinian solution to put the ‘eyes’ on stalks, kind of like how many insects have waving sensors on antennæ. Stalks. Problem is that the ‘bots’ start looking insect-like. Nothing against insects, given Humankind’s experimentation with Furries and unrecognizable tattoo horrors, but hey. We want the PUBLIC to generally embrace The Bots with favorable countenance.
Stalks are good. Could have 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, like the points on a crown. Ohh, ohh … eyes on a crown! That’d work. Could still stick it faddishly on a purported head-of-sorts. Like this silly hollow one. So, so Art School.
And, for all that, the “ears” could as well diverge from left-right placement on the head-blob. Could have 3, 4, 5 or 6 of them in a ring … along with the stalks … on the Crown. If stereo-sensory is good, then hexagonal ought to be totally awesome. The computing problem(s) of discriminating a 6-way stereo or video stream into synthetic point-of-origin information isn’t much different from 2-way.
It looks like Apollo is “checking off the check-boxes”, yah! May their 38 million funding multiply (add a zero to the end), and get on with producing competent competition for Tesla and the other Botteries. Bothausen. Botworks.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
But there is one powerful argument to using a (vaguely) humanoid form for a general purpose bot: existing in and interacting with a world with environments, mechanisms and tools built for humans.
And one would assume that the bot can have as many eyes as wanted tucked away here and there around its chassis and perhaps even… some deployable on stalks 🙂