I have long assumed that we won’t be getting robot butlers partly because it’s really really hard, but also because most of not all things we want robots for it’s easier to reconfigure the environment than make a flexible humaniod
So factories are obvious but the real mass uptake is the home - and honestly I think something that cleans and tidies an hour a day might actually be achievable
As much as I like the concept, 3D printing everything is not the way to lower cost.
Mass-produced (stamped / extruded / whatever) mechanical parts + hackable 'brains' is.
Robots do lend themselves well w/ respect to that last part. Worst case is rip out its control electronics wholesale & replace with your own motor drivers etc.
Hm, perhaps not - but maybe give the users an option to print such parts, and warn that they may affect longevity of said parts if they do decide to go full manufacturing route.
My potential concern is the "Apple" gatekeeping of parts.
It depends what you're doing. High volume parts, absolutely. It's one of the things that bugs me about the "3D printers printing printers" type projects. 3D printing is terrible for mass producing parts. If you're making 1000+ of something, injection mold it.
Low volume, probably customized parts like R&D robotics tends to need? 3D printing is great, especially if the design files are available so you can modify the parts as required before printing. And then if you break something you can print another one off overnight instead of stalling your project for weeks waiting for new parts to arrive.
The "Berkeley Humanoid" is a distinct robot (they have the "Berkeley Humanoid Lite" named "ours" and colored in orange as the rightmost point on their graph).
the cost-effectiveness/performance factor benchmark is interesting, but it feels slightly misleading - I just don't see how "average peak torque of all actuated DoFs, normalized by the robot's size" is related to measuring "accessibility and customizability" of the robot.
What is interesting is that on their own metric, the Berkley Humanoid is only twice as expensive as the Berkley Humanoid Lite but has more than twice the "performance factor" (0.36 vs 0.14).
It shows they threw away too much while creating the lite version.
Depends on the relative market size for performance factor though. If 90 percent of the market is captured by a 0.14 performance factor then that extra in price could be put towards solving another problem.
Rather, I think we can say based on those datapoints that for their design, performance scales superlinearly with cost. Not surprising given fixed costs!
The comment criticizes a chart or metric comparing "performance factor" to torque and degrees of freedom (DOFs) in robotics, calling it "the most silly thing" the commenter, a licensed mechanical engineer, has seen. By referencing "Kony 2012"—a widely mocked internet campaign—they emphasize their point about the chart's perceived absurdity. ([The performance factor vs. torque vs. DOFs is the most silly thing as ...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801052&utm_source=cha...))
The critique likely stems from the idea that combining performance factor, torque, and DOFs into a single comparison oversimplifies complex engineering concepts. Torque and DOFs are distinct mechanical properties, and "performance factor" is a vague term without a clear definition. Such a chart might misleadingly suggest direct correlations where none exist, leading to confusion or misinterpretation.
In essence, the commenter is expressing frustration over what they see as a technically flawed and potentially misleading representation of robotic performance metrics.
I think this is a great idea. It seems like we are entering the phase where the core hardware problems are solved and we now need to:
A) bring down cost and expand the design space for the hardware and
B) minimise the barriers to working on the "software" problems where there still seem to be huge areas of mostly unaddressed challenges.
An open source platform seems like a good thing for both.
I have long assumed that we won’t be getting robot butlers partly because it’s really really hard, but also because most of not all things we want robots for it’s easier to reconfigure the environment than make a flexible humaniod
So factories are obvious but the real mass uptake is the home - and honestly I think something that cleans and tidies an hour a day might actually be achievable
As much as I like the concept, 3D printing everything is not the way to lower cost.
Mass-produced (stamped / extruded / whatever) mechanical parts + hackable 'brains' is.
Robots do lend themselves well w/ respect to that last part. Worst case is rip out its control electronics wholesale & replace with your own motor drivers etc.
Hm, perhaps not - but maybe give the users an option to print such parts, and warn that they may affect longevity of said parts if they do decide to go full manufacturing route.
My potential concern is the "Apple" gatekeeping of parts.
It depends what you're doing. High volume parts, absolutely. It's one of the things that bugs me about the "3D printers printing printers" type projects. 3D printing is terrible for mass producing parts. If you're making 1000+ of something, injection mold it.
Low volume, probably customized parts like R&D robotics tends to need? 3D printing is great, especially if the design files are available so you can modify the parts as required before printing. And then if you break something you can print another one off overnight instead of stalling your project for weeks waiting for new parts to arrive.
https://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org/static/comparision.png
why does it say the Berkeley Humanoid is closed source here? Is it a typo, was this paper peer-reviewed?
The "Berkeley Humanoid" is a distinct robot (they have the "Berkeley Humanoid Lite" named "ours" and colored in orange as the rightmost point on their graph).
the cost-effectiveness/performance factor benchmark is interesting, but it feels slightly misleading - I just don't see how "average peak torque of all actuated DoFs, normalized by the robot's size" is related to measuring "accessibility and customizability" of the robot.
What is interesting is that on their own metric, the Berkley Humanoid is only twice as expensive as the Berkley Humanoid Lite but has more than twice the "performance factor" (0.36 vs 0.14).
It shows they threw away too much while creating the lite version.
Depends on the relative market size for performance factor though. If 90 percent of the market is captured by a 0.14 performance factor then that extra in price could be put towards solving another problem.
Rather, I think we can say based on those datapoints that for their design, performance scales superlinearly with cost. Not surprising given fixed costs!
been cool watching robots go open source like this, always gets me thinking how much i could hack together something dumb just to see if it works
The performance factor vs. torque vs. DOFs is the most silly thing as a licensed mechanical engineer I have ever seen. And I was around for Kony 2012.
Can you explain why to the layman?
https://chatgpt.com/share/680cb5ae-10d8-8007-a580-b7c3266138...
The comment criticizes a chart or metric comparing "performance factor" to torque and degrees of freedom (DOFs) in robotics, calling it "the most silly thing" the commenter, a licensed mechanical engineer, has seen. By referencing "Kony 2012"—a widely mocked internet campaign—they emphasize their point about the chart's perceived absurdity. ([The performance factor vs. torque vs. DOFs is the most silly thing as ...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801052&utm_source=cha...))
The critique likely stems from the idea that combining performance factor, torque, and DOFs into a single comparison oversimplifies complex engineering concepts. Torque and DOFs are distinct mechanical properties, and "performance factor" is a vague term without a clear definition. Such a chart might misleadingly suggest direct correlations where none exist, leading to confusion or misinterpretation.
In essence, the commenter is expressing frustration over what they see as a technically flawed and potentially misleading representation of robotic performance metrics.
Why do you think this excessively verbose bit of LLM vomit contributes to the conversation?
Robot gets Piercing in Berkeley:
https://youtu.be/0Gkl1H2eKsM?t=99
Servitude: Robot Waiter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg
Empathy: Broken Robot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE
Very cool! Open source robotics is something I always imagined to be a part of the future. Hope the idea catches on.
A left handed robot!