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donpdonp 23 hours ago [-]
$6,500 for OpenArm v2. Incredibly smooth movement, 4kg of load per arm. Its unclear how far the level of autonomous control has come so far. The video shows mostly tele-operated operation. I have to agree with other comments here that folding laundry is the killer app.
sschueller 9 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why everyone wants to build a laundry folding robot that is humanoid when we generally build purpose built machines which can do a much better and quicker job.
I want to toss dirty laundry into a hopper and have it come out clean and folded at the other end.
There is no reason to use my existing washer and dryer that are designed for human use.
AngryData 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah but nobody has had any successful ideas for sorting and folding random fabric and clothes in any other way. Its not that people wouldn't mind a non-humanoid laundry robot/device, the problem is nobody has found any other solution to solve the problem, human hands and minds and methods are the only currently known solution.
3 hours ago [-]
moffkalast 22 hours ago [-]
One would expect it to at least have calibration and inverse kinematics solved. That's still a massive pain point for the SO-ARM101 despite it being so common now, since there's no base_link to gripper calibration nor sag compensation and every center offset stacks.
Lerobot banked on having full DL control of each joint so they wouldn't have to do that properly, but now VLAs just use inverse kinematics as a crutch and predict gripper offsets, so we're back to square one.
drapado 22 hours ago [-]
Hi! do you have any references for VLAs using inverse kinematics? I'm very curious and can't find much
moffkalast 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not super up to date on new releases, the one I'm most familiar with is X-VLA which predicts gripper poses and relative movement deltas for kinematics to move to instead of joints, and trains on forward kinematic gripper poses. I think Intern and Octo have the same approach.
altruios 16 hours ago [-]
Respectfully, that's the corporate-washed killer app.
Intimacy between people in a long distance relationship: that's the killer app.
That's a niche inside a niche. It's a step up from existing solutions, but not an enormous one.
fhn 8 hours ago [-]
take "people" out of that equation would be even better
8note 12 hours ago [-]
probably not quite.
intimacy over onlyfans with a guy in india pretending to be the woman is the proper killer app.
XorNot 14 hours ago [-]
No it's definitely folding laundry.
My intimacy with my partner in a short difference marriage would improved it we could eliminate folding washing from the weekly chores.
failbuffer 11 hours ago [-]
Have you tried getting a folding board or folding table? Helps accelerate the process and produces neater results. I love mine!
mrguyorama 12 hours ago [-]
So, uh, have you tried just not folding laundry?
I think it's funny how often "Folding Laundry" is brought up as the critical use case as if that's a labor function that needs to be done in the first place!
Some of us already live in the Utopia of not folding laundry!
I'm not advocating, but pointing out how silly it is that the supposed linchpin of the end of human labor is a completely voluntary and unnecessary task. I get why it can be a good example, because it's common and "hard" in that computery way that seems like it shouldn't be that hard, and that it's supposed to represent all the other hard problems of housework.
But we know what the household robot industry considers "solved" to look like, and I'm not that satisfied with roombas, and knowing that, is $6000 for something that could fold your laundry really that much better a proposition than just being wrinkly sometimes? Downey produces a product that you spray on a clothing item and stretch it and it stops being wrinkly. Totally unnecessary, but way cheaper than $6000.
fhn 8 hours ago [-]
how dare you suggest actually doing the work. outrageous!
8note 12 hours ago [-]
folding laundry is an exemplary case of a lot of household work which involves carefully collecting items through the house, putting them into a machine to run a cleaning cycle, then putting them away in their right location.
folding is a hard middle step in the laundry process, but the job is end to end
CompoundEyes 13 hours ago [-]
In the movie Idiocracy they have a dispenser with fresh clothes to put on covered in advertising — assuming free. I’m surprised that doesn’t exist and perhaps made of recycled plastic?
euroderf 12 hours ago [-]
It's cleaning the dang bathroom.
PowerElectronix 20 hours ago [-]
I hope someone teaches it to perform a highly sophisticated secret handshake.
teamolHuang 23 hours ago [-]
Finally, automatic hand for single man
subscribed 18 hours ago [-]
That came out more sexist than funny.
17 hours ago [-]
NegativeLatency 1 days ago [-]
Crosses fingers for a general purpose laundry folding bot
smokel 1 days ago [-]
We've come a long way from watching 50x speedups [1] to real-time [2] videos of watching robots fold clothes, student-style.
Off-topic, but even though it was 16 years ago, the robot looks so beautiful and well-designed. It looks so aesthetic!
eichin 12 hours ago [-]
It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)
bluebarbet 22 hours ago [-]
To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.
nater5000 17 hours ago [-]
People are consuming useless plastic toys at an unfathomable rate. It's one example, but it likely contributes so much more to the stress on our planet than actual robots capable of providing actual utility by a huge margin. I'll question the use of humanity's resources once we reel in behaviors like that a bit.
dan-bailey 16 hours ago [-]
You leave my Lego collection out of this.
showerst 17 hours ago [-]
Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.
embedding-shape 20 hours ago [-]
I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.
brookst 16 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don’t understand this binary thinking. You could easily turn it around: if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise.
Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym.
Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?
bluebarbet 11 hours ago [-]
True, but both of you are missing my main point.
>if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym
Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.
King-Aaron 24 hours ago [-]
I just want my laundry folding robot to run slower than me, and not be able to do karate backflips etc in the event of some undesired scope creep happening one day.
nannal 23 hours ago [-]
House scale Faraday cages and an airlock for fiber optics. Should be sufficient until maybe 2032.
mxmilkiib 23 hours ago [-]
I've got a collection of socks needing darning!
brookst 16 hours ago [-]
Oh great now you’re outsourcing the “where the hell did the other sock go and why are there always odd numbers coming out of the dryer” existential crises to AI. Is there no aspect of the human experience you won’t cede to machines?
16 hours ago [-]
ethanwillis 23 hours ago [-]
A fully open-source humanoid arm for physical
AI research and deployment in contact-rich
environments.
When will someone release this but for deployment in target-rich environments?
hobofan 21 hours ago [-]
I think in target-rich environments, the humanoid form is pretty easy to beat.
officialchicken 19 hours ago [-]
Seriously, Are we nunchaku yet? If so, I would like a Bruce Lee edition in classic yellow.
phkahler 14 hours ago [-]
Are these stepper motors or torque/force commanded?
MrPapz 21 hours ago [-]
This would be great to take advanced healthcare like surgery to remote communities!
- "Robots – Comprehensive catalog of 115 humanoid and quadruped robots" re: MJCF in mujoco_menagerie, awesomerobots, robot-descriptions/awesome-robot-descriptions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727432
- I can think of at least one museum that already has interactive demo robot arms that are in need of repair or replacement
NetOpWibby 24 hours ago [-]
One step closer to becoming Adam Jensen
King-Aaron 24 hours ago [-]
Or Smasher, there's a few Adams we're taking steps towards
NetOpWibby 2 hours ago [-]
Smasher's too bulky and his quips ("You look like a cut of fuckable meat") don't match his hardware.
tsumnia 16 hours ago [-]
You don't say... XD
nicman23 24 hours ago [-]
i asked for this
prometheus1992 18 hours ago [-]
i'm not really sure if people are being sarcastic about laundry folding being the real application of this because I have never felt in my life that i want a robot folding my laundry. i actually love folding my laundry.
AngryData 1 hours ago [-]
I don't like folding laundry, but that's why I just lay all my clothes out flat, which still negates the desire for a robot to do it.
slfnflctd 17 hours ago [-]
It's a huge milestone for robotic capabilities more generally. This particular problem has been discussed a ton in robotics communities. It requires a gentle-but-firm grip and extreme dexterity across a wide range of shapes, sizes, weights, densities and material types.
If a somewhat affordable robot can fold some of your laundry in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden there are a lot more new and useful things it can do as well. It's a metric.
Plus there are also people who don't like folding laundry. Like me.
prometheus1992 16 hours ago [-]
>>> If a somewhat affordable robot can fold some of your laundry in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden there are a lot more new and useful things it can do as well. It's a metric.
I see, is it like arc agi but for robots? wouldn't the companies just laundryfold-maxx their robots then?
throwup238 14 hours ago [-]
That would mean maximizing robotic dexterity, not just control, which means improved hardware. Roboticists would be ecstatic with a laundry-maxxed robot.
slfnflctd 15 hours ago [-]
My current opinion is that trying to 'maxx' in this area (as has been done with other benchmarks) would actually bring enough other use cases with it as a side effect that it would be worthwhile.
I want to toss dirty laundry into a hopper and have it come out clean and folded at the other end.
There is no reason to use my existing washer and dryer that are designed for human use.
Lerobot banked on having full DL control of each joint so they wouldn't have to do that properly, but now VLAs just use inverse kinematics as a crutch and predict gripper offsets, so we're back to square one.
Intimacy between people in a long distance relationship: that's the killer app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
Uh, the main site appears to be down (and most wouldn't click on the link, given it's name) - but you can read about a project here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Haines
intimacy over onlyfans with a guy in india pretending to be the woman is the proper killer app.
My intimacy with my partner in a short difference marriage would improved it we could eliminate folding washing from the weekly chores.
I think it's funny how often "Folding Laundry" is brought up as the critical use case as if that's a labor function that needs to be done in the first place!
Some of us already live in the Utopia of not folding laundry!
I'm not advocating, but pointing out how silly it is that the supposed linchpin of the end of human labor is a completely voluntary and unnecessary task. I get why it can be a good example, because it's common and "hard" in that computery way that seems like it shouldn't be that hard, and that it's supposed to represent all the other hard problems of housework.
But we know what the household robot industry considers "solved" to look like, and I'm not that satisfied with roombas, and knowing that, is $6000 for something that could fold your laundry really that much better a proposition than just being wrinkly sometimes? Downey produces a product that you spray on a clothing item and stretch it and it stops being wrinkly. Totally unnecessary, but way cheaper than $6000.
folding is a hard middle step in the laundry process, but the job is end to end
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo
[2] https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0
Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym.
Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?
>if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym
Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.
- "Robots – Comprehensive catalog of 115 humanoid and quadruped robots" re: MJCF in mujoco_menagerie, awesomerobots, robot-descriptions/awesome-robot-descriptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727432
- I can think of at least one museum that already has interactive demo robot arms that are in need of repair or replacement
If a somewhat affordable robot can fold some of your laundry in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden there are a lot more new and useful things it can do as well. It's a metric.
Plus there are also people who don't like folding laundry. Like me.
I see, is it like arc agi but for robots? wouldn't the companies just laundryfold-maxx their robots then?