alt Hacker NewsI’m optimistic about humanoid robotics, but I’m curious about the reliability issue. Biological limbs and hands are quite miraculous when you consider that they are able to constantly interact with the world, which entails some natural wear and tear, but then constantly heal themselves.
Replies
It does either get very exciting or very spooky thinking of the possibilities in the near future.
I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.
I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.
Consumable components could be automatically replaced by other robots.
I'm interested how differences with robots work overtime, there are a lot of machines in this world that have been patched or "jimmied up" to continue working, let's say a mining robot, it would probably get quite heavily contaminated with dust, wear would occur in different places, rock falls might bend parts.
So even though another robot could probably do the "jimmy up". it seems like overtime, the robots will "drift" into all being a bit different.
Even commercial airlines seem to go through fairly unique repairs from things like collisions with objects, tail strikes etc.
Maybe it's just easier to recycle robots?
I think those problems can be solved with further research in material science, no? Combined that with very responsive but low torque servos, I think this is a solvable problem.
Industrial robots at least are very reliable, MTBF is often upwards of 100,000 hours[0]. Industrial robots are optimized to be as reliable as possible because the longer they last and less often they need to be fixed, the more profitable they are. In fact, German and Japanese companies came to dominate the industrial robotics market because they focused on reliability. They developed rotary electric actuators that were more reliable. Cincinnati Millicron(US) was out competed in the industrial robot market because although their hydraulic robots were strong, they were less reliable.
I am personally a bit skeptical of anthropormophic hands achieving similarly high reliability. There's just too many small parts that need to withstand high forces.
[0]https://robotsdoneright.com/Articles/what-are-the-different-...