Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/15/24101791/mercedes-robot-humanoid-apptronik-apollo-manufacturing

by distalx • 2 years ago

33 69 2 years ago

Solvency• 2 years ago

I'll never understand this fascination with humanoid robots. It smacks of our innate narcissism, which lead to hilariously ironic and pervasive belief systems like "God made MAN in HIS image!" (surely not the other way around!)

Meanwhile the whole world already operates on incredibly precise high-tolerance robots doing low skill and repetitive tasks as well as extremely "high skill" tasks like painting/manufacturing cars or milling metal.

And we have wheeled robots like Autostore.com for other automation tasks.

A humanoid robot exists only to tickle our perverse self-centric obsessions, and namely: news sites, news consumers, and executives.

lupyro• 2 years ago

I guess it depends on where you draw the line on what is a humanoid.

The world we've built for ourselves is for humans. If you need a robot to flip a hotel room for the next guest it may not need real legs but its probably gonna be column shaped with some arms. That's humanoid to me.

Not trying to single out a hotel maid as low skilled, just trying to use an example of a common task in a very human environment

Nonoyesnoyes2• 2 years ago

I saw a 'robot' for a kitchen which was basically two robot arms on a rail installed on the ceiling.

It would also be super ugly (potentially) to have those specialized robots.

Nonoyesnoyes2• 2 years ago

A human robot is a robot you can put everywhere were a human can be.

this means it's seen as the holy Grail for a / the generic helper.

You build it once and replace any human manual laber task.

Basically you show the robot what it does by just doing it a few times and than the robot takes over.

Specialized 'robots' are closer to an assembly line someone needs to plan and design who knows how to do so and knows how to think like this.

Easy for an engineer hard for a normal human.

And when you look at.the progress it's not far fetched that this idea is close to become reality in the next 10-20 years.

RajT88• 2 years ago

Why build a system today which uses HTTP as its transport protocol for communication? It's not the most efficient or robust, right? It's because there's a robust ecosystem and toolchain around HTTP as a transport protocol.

Making humanoid robots, while vain on the surface, does kind of make sense. If it's humanoid, it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of human tasks using systems designed for human hands and feet. It's just a matter of training for the tasks.

You wouldn't task an ED-209 with cleaning an office building. You'd end up with dirty stairwells.

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

Low skill, but higher skill than the automation already in place it seems; it says "like having Apollo inspect and deliver components to human production line workers", but there's less expensive and more reliable ways to do that - like conveyor belts and whatnot.

Call me a luddite but it looks like an overly error prone solution looking for a problem to me.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

it looks like an overly error prone solution looking for a problem to me

It looks like starting with a small, manageable problem before expanding the robot’s scope of work.

huytersd3• 2 years ago

You start where you can before moving on harder tasks. A conveyor belt is never going to be able to weld curved joints and be wiring installers in the future.

owa945jw• 2 years ago

I used to work for Apptronik, and for several other humanoid projects. These robots are not going to be doing tasks that are at the edge of human dexterity any time soon. They can barely drop objects into boxes.

Edit:

I saw a video a few days ago from Figure where it was putting dishes onto a dish rack at relatively high speed and that was genuinely impressive, possibly the best object manipulation I've seen. But that's still closer to dropping objects in boxes than to the welding and wiring work that I've done.

TaylorAlexander2• 2 years ago

You hit the nail on the head with conveyor belts. I am a robotics engineer and I believe strongly that if done properly, automating the economy can be very good for us ("properly" to me means making sure there is some scheme for collective ownership and collective benefit, for example by encouraging cooperatives to automate), but in my mind this is best done with purpose built machines, not a bunch of very expensive humanoids.

ragebol• 2 years ago

The societal change to do this 'properly' in your terms, how can this be achieved? I've come up with the more or less same solution, but I don't see it happening.

zelon88• 2 years ago

When you think about the manufacturing advances of the past 60 years, this is logical.

Machinists used to require skill. Now they LITERALLY just screw the part into a machine and press a green button. And the pay went from 100k+ to $45k. And the technology went from $75k to $1m. But it's still cheaper to pay a human to push a cart then it is to develop the rest of that technology.

But this is the investment that next level requires. Look at the progression (Google search this) from a Bridgeport, to a Mazak Nexus 6800, and then look at a Mazak Pallettech robot.

The first machine is completely manual. Most have retrofit digital displays and some have retrofit powered axis, but you still have to know what you're doing. The second one is semi automatic, you just need a human to set it up and an even dumber human to run it. The last machine is a robot that you bolt onto the second machine to get rid of the dumb human operator.

jdietrich• 2 years ago

All of those less expensive and more reliable ways are already being used to the greatest extent possible. A modern car plant is absolutely crammed with autonomous guided vehicles and conveyor belts and any other means you could imagine of transporting stuff.

Mercedes are probably looking at final assembly for this technology, which is the most labor-intensive stage by a large margin, mainly because you've got to fit awkwardly-shaped parts into awkwardly-shaped places. A humanoid robot can potentially do useful work in this area without having to completely reimagine the final assembly line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlguwy9JMSA

chaxor• 2 years ago

If cheap enough, it may solve a problem for people who don't know that they need to hire engineers to make that conveyor belt, or if they don't know if the conveyor belt will be needed for more than a few months.

If it's general enough, but does simple tasks, that's still a win over 'this is a nutcracker that work only with this precise nut +-1 mm at a rate of _exactly_ 1 nut per hour +-0.1 seconds.' which may be some of the types of machines out there.

rightbyte2• 2 years ago

Wouldn't wheeled robots be better for flat factory floors, if it is supposed to deliver parts? What is the point of the legs.

"Mercedes has started trialing an undisclosed number of Apollo robots at a factory in Hungary. The country has experienced labor shortages for several years as workers migrate to Western Europe, with Audi and Mercedes having both expressed concerns regarding labor supply in 2016."

Raise wages?

FirmwareBurner4• 2 years ago

Wouldn't wheeled robots be better for flat factory floors, if it is supposed to deliver parts? What is the point of the legs.

Yeah but publishing videos of humanoid robots is proven to pump your car company stock to the moon. If Mercedes can also buy a cryptocurrency and a social media platform they're golden.

Raise wages?

No no, you see we need open borders and visa free uncontrolled migration so companies have the upper hand and get to pick and choose whatever they want from the world labor pool until they find complacent workers on their terms, instead of having to pay locals competitively. Otherwise it's considered a labor shortage.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

we need open borders and visa free uncontrolled migration so companies have the upper hand and get to pick and choose from the world labor pool instead of the local one

Hungary is in Schengen. Their workers left for higher-paying jobs. The company can’t move as easily because they already plopped down a plant. (Hungary is also one of the EU’s most migrant-sceptic members.)

mwigdahl• 2 years ago

That would empower labor and reduce profits. Now hear me out, what if you could somehow transmute labor into capital? Then you could actually _own_ the labor and retain _all_ the surplus value generated from it!

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

Wouldn't wheeled robots be better for flat factory floors, if it is supposed to deliver parts?

It’s clearly intended to do more.

Raise wages?

They have been [1], though not enough [2]. That said, it’s unclear whether the problem is ongoing emigration or past depletion.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/hungary-labour-carmakers-idU...

[2] https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/the-g...

wongarsu• 2 years ago

But every car factory has wheeled robots, and fixed platform robots, and robots running on rails on the ceiling. And everyone is already used to robot dogs being deployed by just about everybody with an innovation budget. The only way left to have press about robots in a car factory is to make them bipedal.

I'm betting that the 'undisclosed number' has exactly one digit, and the robots doing actual work is not part of the reason why Mercedes is doing this

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

Raise wages?

I think if the choice is between spending money now for r&d that enables future free labor or spending more now and forever on human labor it's obvious what choice a capitalist system incentives.

We are rapidly approaching an inflection point where the rules of capitalism don't work anymore. The road bifurcates there and I'm not sure that we are capable of getting the good ending.

lp4vn3• 2 years ago

We are rapidly approaching an inflection point where the rules of capitalism don't work anymore. The road bifurcates there and I'm not sure that we are capable of getting the good ending.

What are you talking about exactly? Can you elaborate?

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

We are rapidly approaching an inflection point where the rules of capitalism don't work anymore

I assume this is a reference to a technological singularity [1].

At the point capitalism breaks down, virtually every other social institution does as well. Until we know what that future looks like, and what the new constraints are, it is impossible to put in place a better system.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

rightbyte2• 2 years ago

Since when are long term profits of any concern? Also, first mover disadvantage. You can just wait for someone else to figure it out and learn from them.

This is clearly a pet project or from the marketing budget.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Delivering parts? Humanoid carrying single box feels like massive waste. Throw something pallet sized maybe 1,5m high or even higher that has simple mechanics to drop a box and move multiple of boxes. And then make it move multiple boxes at time...

potta_coffee• 2 years ago

A forklift with the brain of a Roomba

swizzler• 2 years ago

It's real! Kiva Systems built the roomba part that can raise a shelf above them and drive it around (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSA5Bq-1fU4). Amazon bought them.

qgin• 2 years ago

Mercedes has really been a dark horse in autonomous tech. First a commercially available level-3 driving system, now this

acchow• 2 years ago

Only level 3 in a very specific scenario: “At up to 40mph in traffic jam situations on highways”

Which is the easiest possible scenario. Slow speed, highways only (no intersections, no pedestrians)

huytersd3• 2 years ago

Their level 3 has so many restrictions it’s like saying “level 3 only on 22 miles between Bakersfield and Los Angeles”.

ximeng5• 2 years ago

Almost any article on automation has a sentence about freeing highly skilled workers for more valuable tasks. Along with the talk of tight labour supply it comes across as disingenuous when the value is replacing the cost of low skill workers.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

when the value is replacing the cost of low skill workers

My electrician is highly skilled. He still has to drive himself to the job site and unpack his tools there, which is low-skill labor.

ximeng5• 2 years ago

This technology will replace your electrician

donmcronald• 2 years ago

I bet that robot is amazing at walking down the golden path.

bpiche• 2 years ago

I think Mercedes built expensive humanoid body doubles in Gibson’s “The Peripheral”? Gonna be interested to see if his predictions come true again

karaterobot• 2 years ago

Cool, now we just need to continually redefine "low skill" as whatever AI and robots are capable of doing, and we've got an all-purpose justification for laying people off.

Step 3 is "profit!". While step 4 may be "widespread suffering and social unrest", we can just redefine our process as ending at step 3, and it's no big deal.

All problems can be solved by taking the right perspective!

guerrilla• 2 years ago

Just wait until police become "low skill." Then we have a serious and potentially permanent problem where AI-robot police efficiently enforce property rights while everyone else starves to death or is killed fighting the police.

Terr_• 2 years ago

low skill

I like to quip that the most complex nanotechnological products in existence are all created by unskilled labor--not that I want to devalue your mother's nine months of work. :p

robotburrito• 2 years ago

I wonder what happens if your consumer base has all had their incomes replaced by AI? Who buys your product your now making with it? Does AI just lead to the end of capitalism as we know it?

tyingq• 2 years ago

I think people tend to underestimate how awful the shaky interim period might be. Before everyone signs on to some sane way to address this sort of thing.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

Does AI just lead to the end of capitalism as we know it?

This reminds me of Marinetti predicting electricity will usher in a post-scarcity world [1]. (Like, students will be hooked up to outlets to learn faster, electricity in the ground will make crops grow faster, flying cities will make land scarcity a thing of the past, et cetera.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti

hnbad2• 2 years ago

In retrospect, most of these "technological post-scarcity utopianism" predictions fell flat because they did not account for enclosure.

For example, automation may increase worker productivity but that doesn't benefit the worker but the owner: the worker may actually be worse off because the owner will now likely fire workers due to the reduced labor need and the resulting reduction of available jobs suppresses wages. On the other hand, some jobs where workers would outperform automation will be underpriced to the point that it's not worth paying someone a livable wage for the quality advantage over an automated process at a fraction of the cost so those jobs go away too.

Or for food production we may be producing an abundance but as the total need is limited, instead of reducing prices because of the increased supply, we end up instead importing out of season produce from the other side of the world, min-maxing convenience food for appeal/addictiveness and destroying unsold goods to avoid lowering the market price.

Or for drugs we literally value the sanctity of patents over the lives of people in underdeveloped countries who couldn't afford the medicine in their lifetimes (cf. the refusal to suspend/discount COVID vaccine patents for poorer countries to allow them to produce generics to vaccinate their populations).

barelyauser2• 2 years ago

The mistake you make (and a lot of people also do) is to assume the purpose of the system is to somehow cater to your (the consumer) needs. The purpose of the system is to fulfill the needs of the elite (those who benefit from the system). Average people having a car is a thing because then people will be more productive. But make no mistake, if the rich don't get what they want FIRST then your whole economy goes into recession and what not.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

You’re conflating the rich and elite, which the nuance on which entire systems of government are built.

jamesgreenleaf• 2 years ago

If the elite are defined as those who benefit from the system, then we are all the elite.

reaperman3• 2 years ago

From a pure game-theory perspective, consumers are important for their potential labor. As long as there is something productive that they can specialize in that might give your group an advantage over other groups --- it is useful to produce and distribute all the things which keep them productive. Maybe 100% of your population will be trained as scientists and mathematicians just on the off-chance they can discover something that AI cannot and give you an edge over other similarly-advanced groups.

If the AI's can truly replace humans to the point where there is nothing useful for your humans to be doing, then it would cease to matter whether or not the rulers produce and distribute the things the consumers need/want. You'd need good enough AI security to handle any unrest which ensues, and protect any natural resources that might be important to you.

If you no longer can utilize any of the labor of your consumers, then the only products you need to make are: 1) The things you personally want, and 2) The things needed to maintain sovereignty against any other similarly advanced groups. Category #1 would be a very small volume, but Category #2 might be industrially more than the entire world's current production of everything, just for your fiefdom. It would be unstable until someone conquered the entire globe, and would likely only need to provide for about 500-5000 people in their "court" to provide for the rulers own selfish social needs.

lp4vn3• 2 years ago

I think that at some point AI will enter the domain of repetitive physical jobs, like for example an experienced butcher will train an AI arm that eventually will learn to slice meat correctly since that's an activity that normally works with a reasonably standardized product(the animal carcass).

Keeping that in mind, honestly for me it's hard not to be very skeptical that it would make any economic sense in the next many decades to have an expensive humanoid robot performing tasks with a very low aggregated value like moving boxes one by one. Just because it's a robot performing an economic activity it doesn't necessarily mean it will be productive or competitive.

darkwizard42• 2 years ago

I don't know about your example, animal carcasses vary a bunch and it would have to be great at not leaving any meat wasted. Maybe like hammering a nail or properly turning screws and checking tightness?

I think it will do well at performing economic activities that don't have real hard time constraints, but just require labor. Ex. moving boxes around from one storehouse to another...leave the last bit of sorting and packing to humans, but now you don't need someone doing the boring work.

lp4vn3• 2 years ago

I don't know about your example, animal carcasses vary a bunch and it would have to be great at not leaving any meat wasted.

Cutting meat in practice is an activity that's more complex than it looks and for sure carcasses vary a lot, but even taking in account all their variation they still follow a pattern. At some point I'm sure we'll have robotic AI arms that will be trainable just like chatGPT is, so after being trained by a profession with thousands and thousands of hours, the hypotetical intelligent robotic arm eventually learns to do the job just fine 99.99% of the time and that's enough.

Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks

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