Humanoid robot: The evolution of Kawasaki’s challenge

https://kawasakirobotics.com/in/blog/202511_kaleido/

by hhs • 5 months ago

30 19 5 months ago

kleiba• 5 months ago

Looking at the video at the bottom of the page, the robot looks like an old man, especially in the trash bag throwing sequence. Compare that to the recent Chinese kung-fu robots video...

bsboxe• 5 months ago

Completely different situations. The Unitree demos are prerecorded movements with no real adaptability. While visually impressive, they are highly tuned to perform that specific sequence of actions. If you walked in front of one it would have zero awareness of you and you’d be hit. They’re essentially “blind”. The last video here is likely demonstrating a teleoperated humanoid.

throwawayffffas4• 5 months ago

The Unitree demos are prerecorded movements with no real adaptability.

That is not true. The routine is preprogrammed, but there is adaptability. If there wasn't they would fall on the ground in the first 5 seconds. The movement involved in the routine we saw requires continuous adjustment. You can't just record the movement as you would with a video game animation, real physics get in the way and you end up on your back on the ground trying to do a jump and a backflip.

If you think I am wrong, sure I could be but have a look at atlas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe1dke3Cf7I

The robots motion is not preprogramed at all, see how much more smooth the motion is?

Thats because boston dynamics are using an approach where they try to calculate and take the dynamics of motion into account, just like Unitree.

The kawasaki approach is clearly to use overwhelming torques in an effort to cancel all the dymanics and produce fully controlled movement. Exactly what an old man does as well or a robotic arm in a factory. It's honestly embarrassing it looks like kawasaki has no progress in the last 30 years their robots still move like its 1996.

Have a look here https://underactuated.csail.mit.edu/intro.html for a more indepth explanation of the difference between the two approaches.

imtringued2• 5 months ago

The kawasaki robot had to do something much more impressive, which is to lift a table while another human is holding the other end.

The actual concern here is that there are too many cuts. If the whole table movement sequence was uncut and fully autonomous, that would mean they have the most advanced humanoid robot software in the world.

It means they can autonomously find the correct grasping location on the table for both arms, meaning the robot needs to have a model of the table. The robot needs to know at what height to hold the table to keep the table level and compensate for the human pulling on the object while balancing and autonomously following the direction the human is pulling in.

Of course, since there were many cuts, we don't really know whether that's true. We also don't know if teleoperation is involved or not.

The Chinese robot dancing is cool, because it shows what the hardware is capable of, but it doesn't really show anything on the software side. Contacts with objects are hard in robotics and the kung-fu choreography avoids them for obvious reasons.

voidUpdate• 5 months ago

Humanoid industrial robots are always a little confusing for me. The human form is not best suited for industrial tasks, and by making specialised robot arms, you could improve efficiency etc. It's only if you need to interact with systems that were designed for humans, and can't be modified to work with a more efficient robot that you need humanoids

ACCount373• 5 months ago

Every single task that was easy and economical to offload to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor was already offloaded to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor.

What remains is: all those quirky little one-off processes that aren't very amenable to "robot arm" automation, aren't worth the process design effort to make them amenable to it, and are currently solved by human labor.

Thus, you design new solutions to target that open niche.

Humans aren't perfect at anything, but they are passable at everything. Universal worker robots attempt to replicate that.

"A drop-in replacement for simple human labor" is a very lucrative thing, assuming one could pull it off. And that favors humanoid hulls.

Not that it's the form that's the bottleneck for that, not really. The problem of universal robots is fundamentally an AI problem. Today, we could build a humanoid body that could mechanically perform over 90% of all industrial tasks performed by humans, but not the AI that would actually make it do it.

throwawayffffas4• 5 months ago

Yes that's pretty much it. Some people from boston dynamics were talking on a podcast. And they were saying that they sat down with toyota and figured out they could automate all the tasks in a factory, but it would take 10000 man years or something and toyota makes new trims every six months so you need about 10000 man years every six months or so.

It's the flexibility and adaptability with minimum training that's required.

ath92• 5 months ago

My impression is that a big part of the reason for the sudden boom in humanoid robots is that they lend themselves particularly well to RL based training using human-made training footage using VR. It’s much easier to have a robot broadly copy human actions if the robot looks like a human, instead of having to first translate the human action to your robot arm equivalent.

nosaidit• 5 months ago

Every single task that was easy and economical to offload to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor was already offloaded to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor.

What about doing dishes? That could be done with one arm. Maybe not easy and economical yet, but could be.

There is plenty that has not been seen through.

Laundry folding machines are not in wide distribution.

Robots to put away laundry?

Etc. lots of mundane tasks.

mrp23• 5 months ago

This framing clarifies something people get wrong about humanoid robots. The competition isn't "humanoid vs. better robot" — it's "humanoid vs. hiring another person."

And that reframes the economics entirely. You don't need the robot to be better than a human at any given task. You need the total cost of ownership to be lower than a salary, benefits, turnover, and training. That's a much easier bar to clear once the AI catches up to the body.

The interesting question is whether the AI problem gets solved generally (one model that can do everything) or whether we end up with task-specific AI in a general-purpose body — basically the robot arm paradigm wearing a humanoid suit.

kotaKat• 5 months ago

Meanwhile Honda’s robotics design whittled away after ASIMO’s mild improvements in 2011 and it’s really, really sad.

Humanoid robot: The evolution of Kawasaki’s challenge

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