this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but robots still suck at doing stuff like this. Maybe when they marry robots up with AI, we'll have robots that can figure out what to do when there's the slightest deviation to the operating conditions, like a piece of trash shows up on the line, or they get twisted 30 degrees off from their station, or a part of the line gets moved 2 inches. For now though, robots are only great at following pre-programmed instructions EXACTLY the same way every time. Even then, they still manage to fuck that up some of the time. I worked with welding robots for years that only had one task and one task only, to apply welds to car seat parts, and they fucked up on us all the time, on a daily basis. The technology will get there one day, but I doubt we're there.
Considering how each generation of Boston Dynamics robots becomes more and more graceful, I don't see how the problems you suggested won't be non-issues incredibly fast.
Also, unrelated to your comment, people are delusional if they don't think this is the ultimate goal, right? Amazon's reassurances are bunk - if they could eliminate people they would, they just can't do without them yet.
Boston Dynamic's robots are works of art - the pinnacle of engineering - but its all designed movement. By this I mean the control systems, their movement plans - it is built and designed by experts in their field. It's not quite as simple as "go from A to B and do some parkour on the way". There's a very large gap between "what is mechanically possible to do" and "Just let the robot figure out how to do that".
Mechanically we're ahead of software for manipulation and kinodynamic planning.