They say it has 6 axis per leg and 3 axis per arm .. I'd rather it have 4 axis per leg and 5 axis per arm.
But it's very promising and most likely will be the first affordable humanoid robot.
I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here's an illustration of it. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
The strange thing about fast food places is that there's no "train of food" where you just have to order in a screen and a robotic line makes your food. I'd say it's one of the first places that could do that.
We've seen a few robot restaurants open in the past few years. I wonder how they're getting on. I remember at least one was a failure because it needed humans to supervise everything.
Food is just unpredictable. What shape is lettuce?
Word on the street is that robots that can chop and sautee carefully provided ingredients themselves are probably coming, but that's more evolution than revolution. The big space to watch is AIs taking your order in a more human way.
What's the use case, though? There really isn't much benefit to humanoid form robots outside of looking good to human aesthetics. Much of what robotics and automation would be good for don't actually require humanoid forms.
Navigating human environments. Imagine a team of these robots toting moving boxes down the stairs of a third floor apartment and loading them into a truck.
Yes? A triped robot would have just as much ease navigating human environments, while having much more stability. Same logic applies to arms and joints - there's no real reason to limit it to what humans have, it would likely perform much better in other configurations.
A total inability to fall over or navigate any terrain regardless of roughness isn't a benefit? Increased manipulators would also increase productivity / capability, probably much more than making up for increased cost.
Your argument is essentially that the human form is the best possible one imaginable, which I find highly doubtful.
My argument is that humans have built our cities to be navigated best by the human form, so that in that environment it is the best form. In most terrains a quadruped form is better.
Current prices are meaningless. It's not mass production or retail pricing. I doubt the components actually cost more than a few hundred dollars. It's an extremely limited niche market and prices are based on what will get them the most return on their R&D budget, not anything resembling production cost.
None of these robots can take my job. Until you get one that can do customer service, and then operate in a warehouse running a forklift then I get worried.
there is labor that can* be done with extremely little skill. Think vacuuming a large flat room with nothing valuable on it, that task could be done (more or less) with a robotic vacuum. Entire jobs might not be fully replaced but labor demands can be greatly reduced.
*not necessarily done well, but done to minimum standards
Because it takes a special kind of person to stand in one place for 8-12 hours repeating the same repetitive motion every day for years. I don't have the patience for that shit
Interesting response. I got my CompTIA A+ cert so I could have more options, and applied at over 150 jobs before I got an interview. I'm very aware of how fortunate I am, but it wasn't like I just walked away from factory work easily. I worked in five different factories before I got into tech, and I'm making less than I was before. But my skills are better in other fields for sure
Not sure where you draw the line here, 20 minutes of training, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year? What interval of training inherently makes someone’s labor magically “skilled” and therefore more valuable and worthy of better treatment?
We could just decide that all labor is valuable and treat people with dignity. The “skilled” and “unskilled” workers have significantly more in common than “skilled” workers do with their bosses.
LMAO, that's a MADE UP job. It literally doesn't exist. The amount of mandatory safety training from working in any factory environment excessedes that. That's before you can start learning how to use the production software and automation that the company uses to measure productivity. Finally you have to do the actual task and learn the processes and exceptions that have made it so that the job isn't cost effective to automate in the first place.
Now that's a big company environment. Big companies are the only ones with the economies of scale required so that your can even have employees that only do one thing. At a small company everyone has to wear many hats and there is no such thing as an person that does only one job "you could learn in 10min"
It's easy to imagine "unskilled labour" when you make it up in your head. What sucks is when you then use it to dehumanize and underpay real humans because of your made up fantasy of unskilled labour.
Obviously someone that hasn't spent much time in a factory and don't know what they are talking about.
Sure you got to go through all the safety requirements but that's not a skill.
I've seen job were people load material into a machine and people box finished good, or people destroying WIP, or people moving material, or picking up WIP.
You are just confidently incorrect. A skilled job is something where you are trained and/or have experience in and it takes a long time to teach and learn. Unskilled is were you can grab people from the street and get them working within a day.
Surely you can see why based on supply and demand and cost of training both for the person and the business that unskilled pays less. Why should they be paid the sane as skilled work? It doesn't make sense.
Yes, when you dismiss everything these jobs require as "not skills" then anything can be unskilled labour. Yeah of course working safely in an industrial environment isn't a skill, even babies can do it, that's why conservatives everywhere are trying to bring back child labour!
Well if you change the definitions of things then anything can mean anything.
I don't know what you expect. The fundamental reason unskilled labour is paid less is because basically anyone can do it. You can call it whatever you want but it won't pay the same amount as skilled labour, or whatever you want to call that.
If they could learn that quickly and perform the job that fast, that's a skill. Could everyone get up to speed and start producing things that quickly? I've worked plenty of factory jobs. Most of them aren't simply pressing a button mindlessly, and your speed is a factor. Work faster, produce more, you're employing a skill others may not possess.
Not everyone no, some people have severe mental and physical disabilities.
Everyone that showed up could do the job in that amount of time from what I understand. Some people left because they didn't like it and some people had issues with authority or we lazy and wasn't asked back. But there was a revolving door or temps coming through and no one seemed to struggle.
You know what it means, god dammit. There's jobs anyone can fake with a week of training and there's jobs that need six years of school to not kill people.
My theory would be that some western people are very disquieted to see China take the lead in various technological fields. When I post in r/futurology on Reddit I constantly observe this in China related comments and discussion.
It's disappointing that politics and xenophobia are even a factor in such discussions. As a society, we were always going to make humanoid robots, the question was if we would be ready for them by the time they arrive? Unfortunately, I don't think we are ready and we'll likely use them for profit. But that doesn't take away from the benefits that they can provide. If we can have these assist the sick and elderly, that would be wonderful for society. I just don't see the downside of this article being posted, at the very least it opens up the floor to discussion.
Its kinda cool how by making it mono-rail, they can use a single track rail to have pods moving in both directions, and the rail could still be used during the night for regular cargo trains.
It looks monorail at first but if you look closer its not.
I also wouldn’t want to be the forgetful dumb person that forgot how late it was before taking this thing home because those cargo trains ain't gonna stop.
It is a monorail, the outrigger is just for testing purposes. It's gyro stabilized. The tech has been around for more than 100 years, developers always wanted higher capacity which is problematic.
It actually is monorail. It looks like the stabilizing arm is for when the vehicle is off and not moving. It uses a gyroscope while moving for stabilization
Not if it is strictly time separated. Like I wrote, I could see these pods operate exclusively during the day and regular/cargo trains operate exclusively during the night. Or any other such time based system.
That isn't acceptable. One person who for whatever reason is out late (emergency at work, or invited to a party) will be screwed when they can't get back home and tell everyone else.
While you are not wrong, you should always strive to perfection. Running train transit 24x7x365 is low hanging fruit (modern fully automated trains exist - note that the topic here is trains not buses). You do need to do something about maintenance, so I'll let you get by with 30 minute headways overnight, while during the day you should be running every 5 minutes.
Man I wish our trains ran anywhere near that constantly. They stop the public transit around midnight in my city, but that doesn't stop it from being tremendously useful during the rest of the time. You learn to plan for it, and advocate for improvements whenever you can
If ridership is low, you can’t run train often. And if you can’t run it often, people will not use it. It just does not work. This one has chance to work, since essentially you can run it on demand, like Uber.
No, these pods on existing rails are potentially a TON cheaper. Even if you don't count the cost of maintaining the road (which is significantly more than maintaining rail tracks), the need for paying a driver makes most small shuttle bus services prohibitively expensive.
In this case the rails are already there but unused.
That is also several strike against this. Those rails exist but they are all in really bad shape as they were nearly universally used without maintenance until it was no longer feasible. They are also generally in bad areas where there isn't much need for more transport - we already have roads in good shape (to run a bus on). The only thing this has over a bus is you can run them fully automated - which isn't enough IMO.
I think part of what makes tracks unusable for regular trains is when the rails become too misaligned. Of course that isn't an issue for a vehicle that only requires one rail. I kind of like this idea.
The tracks are also already there, and gyroscope stabilized monorail is a 100+ year old technology, not much new to develop about it other than using modern battery technology and some basic self-driving features for it.
Here's an amazing business plan: take the old designs for a railbus. Remove chassis, design a new chassis, but make it all futuristic. Show it to the investors. They'll say "but I want a pod!" And then you say "But it is a pod. A megapod, even!" And they'll squint and go "oh I see. Let's make 1000 of them."
(And actually this is exactly what people have done in the past. Cool futuristic exterior hiding what's basically just a diesel bus with train wheels.)
Their entire goal is to commercialize it.
Its not about efficiently moving large numbers of people. That makes too much sense for this endeavor since you need a set/rigid schedule and predictable travel patterns.
These abominations, are for the convenience of the individual, in the most poorly thought out way. Rather than waiting for the 3PM, they want to advetise you can show up at 2:51 and get on the next available pod and embark, and charge a premium for no waiting and probably try to jazz up the idea that you don't have to worry about other riders ruining your trip or being a distraction.
It entirely ignores the basic engineering problem of more moving parts means more chances of failure per trip and a single pod going down at best causes the entire line to shut down and at worst a catastrophic pile up as following pods fail to slow or stop and ram into the broken down pod.
Regular trains have conductors who can contact the control station or manually slow the train if an obstruction is on the track and some trains even have engineers on the train or on call who can report to a troubled train in short order to deal with the issue. These smaller pods probably arent all going to have gps or location trackers in them to cut costs so even if the pod can accurately report problems there is no garuntee the engineers will be able to quickly and easily find or know its general location to render assistance as needed.
Id also wager enough of these pods to carry enough passengers to equal a common commuter trainer would have a lot higher maintenance requirements compared to that commuter train, so despite charging higher ticket prices the company probably won't be making any more profit than if they just managed regular trains. I'd be willing to be anyone that concerned about privacy for commuting and willing to pay higher would just find that buying or renting a car or bike was just as cost effective and less restrictive than these pods.
TL;DR this entire exercise is a solution looking for a problem and is generally worse in every way that matters.
By using one rail they can get two-way traffic on one set of tracks. These early units have an anti-tipping safety device that extends to the second rail, but they plan to get rid of that later.
Sadly, monorails require different rails which are taller and thicker this would still apply to a smaller pod style device. I do not see how they could ever keep this balanced on these rails, and don't think the rails would hold up anyways. Additionally, the loop sidedness of the weight distribution seems to me like it can create major issues when the rails have been designed under the idea that it would be more or less equal on both.
This seems like just another person trying to reinvent the wheel because us Americans hate rail, even though the us was built on rail.
Suspended monorails don't take taller rails. You can keep the train upright. It has been well demonstrated. The amount of weight on the rails is insignificant compared to what they were designed for. I doubt there would be any detectable movement.
All that said this seems like an overly complicated solution.
Interesting idea. Would only realistically work on abandoned lines rather than rarely used lines, with special permission from the railroad infrastructure owner and the national governing body for railways (Federal Railroad Administration in the case of US, Eisenbahn-Bundesamt in Germany), since normal railway signalling systems for single track wouldn't work with the bidirectional monorail system.
I like the idea, but there doesn't seem a way for a pod to temporarily move into the other track, which raises questions. Like, how do they handle rebalancing the pods? Ideally, you want a free one at each station for the next person who comes along, but if you come into a station with pods already there, do you have to get out and move to the first pod? Or when you leave your station, do all the pods on the line automatically move one station up the line, making a new pod available for the next person and leaving you a smooth trip to your destination (but limiting energy savings)? Do the pods have to cycle all the way to the end of the line to turn around (again, energy inefficient if most of the traffic is between a lesser number of stations)?
I like the idea, I really do! I'm just curious how they handle balancing availability and traffic.
Good questions. I guess given how lightweight these pods look there could be probably some sort of lifting device at some of the stations to move the pods between the two rails.
Since they're light weight, they don't need the heavy rail for freight trains that put >25 tons per axle. It would be incredibly easy to make little switching stations that could pass, turn, and store these pods. Having mini train infrastructure like that everywhere would complete my autism. Life would be complete and I could die happy in a monorail pod crash.
I've always liked the concept of the gyro monorail, as it avoids the requirement to use elevated track that standard monorails have.
That said, I'm skeptical whenever rail is used for really short railcar configurations (ie a single car). Trains are not just wagons on low-friction tracks, but act as a streamlined unit, only incurring the burden of air resistance once.
This pod design is more-or-less just using the tracks as a traction surface and a guideway. But robotics students everywhere will know that we can build land vehicles which follow markers on the ground, avoiding LIDAR, RADAR, or any other such complexities that self-driving automobiles seem to keep butting up against.
They may have a point, if the goal is to reuse abandoned rail lines as-is, but the focus on reuse seems to miss the alternative solution: 4-wheel pods that steer along a rail-to-trail path. Compared to this self-balancing rail pod, I have to imagine developing or adapting an existing, narrow 4 wheel vehicle is going to be easier and cheaper to maintain. Any concerns about the vehicle steering itself off the path would be similar to concerns about a gyro pod failing to negotiate a curve: both scenarios would go off path. But at least 4 wheel pods would remain upright, while a balancing pod would topple or roll-over.
There's also the whole issue of head-of-line blocking, since without a passing track, every pod behind must wait for passengers to board the pod ahead. Unless they build out the rural "stations" with sidings. But again, at that point, just convert to a trail. No stations or sidings needed.
Two-way pod traffic could still leave enough room for a separated, single-lane of recreational pedestrian or bicycle traffic, which might make sense in rural areas. I'm weary of suggesting that pods and bicycles should share the same lanes though, because then we're back to whole anti-collision issue vis-a-vis self-driving automobile. Two lanes for pods and one lane for bikes/pedestrians is still an improvement over zero lanes and abandoned trackage.
I like where the conversation is going, reclaiming old rights-of-way to better accommodate public needs. But I have to imagine German rail corridors are sufficiently wide for more than a narrow, self-balancing "pod way" and should incorporate other linear transportation ideas while pursuing novel ideas.
Most importantly, the hard part of these projects is the right of way. I agree that it should be used to its greatest advantage. I suspect you could rip these rails up, lay down kiddie train rails and a bike path for the same price.
The biggest reason for standard monorails is grade separation.
The burden of air resistance is negligible at these speeds. The rolling resistance, lifespan, and pollution of rubber tires is a disadvantage, but at these speeds it is probably the best use of rubber tires.
You only need two lanes for pods at passing tracks. The need for continuous two way traffic probably means the capacity has outgrown this solution.
You also have good points. As it happens, near my metro area is a park which does indeed have a children's railroad that both crosses and then parallels a major bike trail. And it's absolutely adorable.
The point re: rubber rolling resistance and pollution is well taken. But I don't think the air resistance is negligible here. I realized now that the linked article doesn't describe the speed of this monorail, so I had assumed it was something like a sauntering 30 kph (18 mph), which if available 24/7/365 from rural areas into the urban core and had consistent on-time performance, that'd be excellent.
But this other article lists the speed for these pods as 60 kph (37 mph). That's kinda terrifying for a pod, where just the gyro components weigh 650 kg (1433 lbs), and definitely implicates air resistance. At that speed, the gyro had better be robust enough to counter sudden winds that would threaten to tilt one pod into the path of an oncoming pod.
Now that I think of it some more, on a horizontal curve, roads will widen the lanes so that vehicles won't side-swipe each other. And tracks are set farther apart than on straightaways, for the same reason. But the pair of rails? They're always 1435 mm (4 ft 8.5 in) apart, so will the pods be designed for a maximum curve speed and angle, or will passing be disallowed on curves?
Finally, I will concede that requiring two way pod lanes would definitely be a success story. But seeing as they're planning to use abandoned trackage, even a single-track railroad will already provide two "lanes" for their pods for free. If they had right-of-way that doesn't have existing track, it's not clear if their plan is to install a single rail.
I would say 30kph would be plenty especially for nonstop on-demand service. 60kph sounds unrealistic.
The reason I think you could lay new track is that kiddie train track is really cheap and used railroad rail is pretty valuable.
The value of a scrap railroad track varies by material and its condition. Depending on its dimensions and shape, a ton can range from $300 to $750. For example, an R50 track will fetch a price of between $200 and $750, while an R65 way will cost more than twice that.
It would be simple to make self driving golf carts that followed a magnetic or inductive guideway or even used a virtually guideway with gps. There are a few of these available off the shelf right now. One I remember is dutch and there was another produced in Great Britain.
The reason I think you could lay new track is that kiddie train track is really cheap and used railroad rail is pretty valuable.
Railroad track is certainly valuable, although its removal and rehabilitating the rail bed can add up. Here in the USA, a number of disused railroads are simply left in place, usually only removing the points which connect to the mainline. I'm informed that part of the reason is due to regulations that make it hard to re-establish a rail segment if the rails are fully dismantled. I also have to imagine that if the rails are too valuable, unscrupulous scrap dealers would have made off with them already.
I certainly agree that any track used in service of a self-balancing pod has better of good or excellent quality, since we absolutely do not want pods coming off due to a rail issue.
I do like that all these ideas are essentially recreating the lazy river experience, but with no inflatable donuts lol
P.S. I added the right link to my last post; I forgot to paste it earlier
Rail is hard to steal because it is hard and heavy. Look at the price of small sections used for anvils. It was a shock for me.
I participated in a exploration of PRT that was done by someone at University of Washington a few decades ago. One of the things discussed was the comparison of travel times between slow PRT and fast light rail. It doesn't take many 60-90 second stops to really slow your average speed.
It's kinda like that brain teaser:
If a race car does the first lap at 60 miles an hour how fast does he have to go on the second lap to average 120.
Something that stuck with me from at least a decade back was multimodal transit, aka cars that can become trains and vice versa. Imagine driving your low speed cargo pod car thing to the local train station and hitching together with a bunch of others before making the hour trip to a neighboring city on rails at high speed only to split up automatically at the other end and continue to your separate destinations. Its a combination of the efficiencies of transit and the freedoms of an individualized last mile solution. It reduces the need for freeways without hurting mobility at the origin/ destination.
It's a plausible idea, although admittedly it only solves one of the automobile-specific drawbacks and leaves the other issues unaddressed. Road trains show that coupling separate vehicles together yields efficiencies for the few, large prime movers, when compared to several small engines. Moving vehicles by rail is the most straightforward way to reduce friction to enable higher speeds.
But designing a road/rail pod that operates in two speed regimes would be difficult if neigh impossible. Consider crash-worthiness: a road-going pod doing 30 kph (18 mph) does not require substantial crumple zones (or at all) but the same pod on rails doing 120 kph (75 mph) will have to be at least tested to similar standards as passenger railcars. It's a strange beast to optimize for two very different conditions, like how airplanes are designed to be either sub-sonic or super-sonic, exclusively. Instead, something like the Amtrak Auto-Train which carries the pods at higher speeds would have all the benefits and nearly none of the downsides.
But going back to the benefits of this idea: platoons solve the issue of poor lane utilization due to spacing between vehicles fore and aft. Coupling is platooning with zero space in between, which also nearly solves the car-to-car communication issue, since they're now all physically connected. The same applies identically to rail, so the efficiency gains from lots of small pods to large platoons would be realized.
The problem that remain, though, are that these pods still need to traverse their destination: there must be pod roads, pod parking spaces and pod parking structures. Then pods will compete with active transportation and their lobby will seek to monopolize public spaces to the detriment of everyone that's not in a pod. Finally, zoning laws will enshrine the pod into ordinances requiring an obscene and arbitrary number of pod parking spaces by business type, inducing demand for pods when walking, bikes, buses, and trains would have also fit the bill.
All that has changed is that the pods can more efficiently flood the urban core and take up space. The 1960s American freeway building spree did exactly this with automobiles, and most cities have yet to recover.
It reduces the need for freeways without hurting mobility at the origin/ destination.
You are 100% correct, with the caveat that mobility is not hurt compared to automobiles. If the standard for public transport is to achieve automobile levels of mobility, we have already lost the game.
In the northeast there used to be a fair bit, but I think a lot has been torn up in the process of making bike paths. A lot of the small towns I grew up in still have intact tracks running between their centers, I'd love if these pods made an appearance, if only to show folks that trains can be useful to them.
That would be a neat feature. I remember in college which was in the middle of nowhere our professor was trying to promote a bike trail between the two closest towns, because there used to be train tracks going through. Good to get anything, like a recreational path, but I'd prefer transport that serves commuting needs too.
Connect them together for efficiency, and maybe use both rails for stability and to reduce design conplexity. (you dont even need any additional infrastructure!) Also, have them arrive regularly, so that users don't need to bother with an app! Brilliant!
Seriously though, it's really amazing how people keep inventing trains but worse. I guess this idea makes some sense if there aren't enough riders for regular train service, but still...
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