The race is on to capture the multi-trillion market for humanoid robots. General-purpose robots can be instantly repurposed for any task by AI. Personal robots, for instance, will cook your meals, clean your house, do your laundry, tutor your kids, drive your car, cut your grass, take care of your elderly parents, repair your plumbing, etc. Whereas an iPhone has many apps accessed from a single device, robots will free you from a single screen to invade the physical world. Tesla will likely set the standard with its Optimus model starting at $20-30,000. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
“There’s an iPhone moment happening with humanoids,” said Brett Adcock, founder of Figure, a humanoid robotics company in California. “It’s going to happen right now,” added the serial entrepreneur, his robots already working on the production line in BMW’s Spartanburg factory. Another major corporate customer is trialing his robots for warehouse work. “To succeed at this, you have to do three things that have never been done before. And you have to get all three of them right within the next 5yrs or you’re going to fail for sure.”
“The first thing is you have to build hardware for humanoids that’s incredibly complex and can never fail, and it’s got to work at human speeds with human range of motion,” explained Adcock. “The second thing is a neural net problem, not a control systems problem. You can’t code your way out of this problem. You need to have a robot that can ingest human-like data through a neural net and it has to be able to imitate what humans do. Humanoid robots are not like arms bolted to a factory table. None of those robots have AI.”
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