Research Notes on Humanoid Robots
IMHO most people fantasize about robots solving general use problems, as in the case of a humanoid, but in reality they will probably be ridiculously impractical compared to human labor. The problem is much like automation vs a manual process.<p>Yes we can certainly automate this or that workflow just give us the specification of what to do, oh did you remember every quirk and nuance. Now to make this work without constant human interaction we actually need to know a lot about the problem, the problem space, the specific requirements of each task because the automation process does not have anything close to common sense reasoning capability. Without that every possible nuance must be explicitly detailed and our brains are not good at that. This is what much of software development is, even when given detailed specs, you find out that there are plenty of requirements yet to be discovered.<p>This is a huge problem in AI. It&#x27;s a complete non-starter of a design problem when making a robot. You really need to know what the hell the thing is going to be used for before you draw 1 line in the cad program. The fantasy of the humanoid model is to say look, humans can do a lot there&#x27;s your design specs go make something that can do that. Good luck, first of all how much energy can you pack in a humanoid robot after affording for actuators and the support structures? How long will the thing last on a single charge? How much and what kind of work can it really do? How do you tell it to do some task? What can it really accomplish? Ok now look at the cost of an employee for one of the mundane jobs, their capabilities are greater, they have true intelligence so you don&#x27;t need to specify arcane level of detail for requirements because they have common sense.<p>Lets not even limit ourselves to humans, any general purpose robot will never be able to compete with a task specific robot and when you think about it, the mundane use cases are often the kind where you do the same thing over and over, aka a limited set of specialized tasks. Well design a robot to do just that and it will be cheaper and more effective than a humanoid robot. Carpet cleaning is one example, a roomba works just fine, no need for a cybernetic humanoid to accomplish that mundane task and the cost differential is huge.