Proof of Concept to Test Humanoid Robots

The human body is sub-optimally designed for most hard work humans do (which is why that work is "hard"). I laugh every time I see AI videos of a human-shaped robot harvesting crops: we have very, very effective crop-harvesting robots right now, and they are shaped like big boxes on wheels because that's a much better shape for doing that.

The use case claimed here is (a) they can move around (b) they are "universal".

But

(a) Those things look like they need a wide berth to move around and flat terrain

(b) Those end effectors are far from universal. The payload weight seems so low that it even dropped an empty box at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIXjy2GWTg&t=150s

In this use case, the robot autonomously picked totes from a storage stack, transported them to a conveyor, and placed them at the designated pickup point for human operators.

Well, yes, you can use a humanoid robot for that, but there are far simpler robotic solutions. There are lots of systems for handling standardized totes.

I noticed they used the wheeled version for the test, so calling it a humanoid feels like a bit of a reach to me. The speed of sixty boxes an hour seems pretty slow if they want to replace actual people on the line.

They look so hilariously slow and bad in the video, and it’s a really simple back and forth task, with empty crates.

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