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0 pointsRobotbeat4y ago0 comments

Your post is about software, but it applies pretty well for hardware.

Like looms.

Robotics is actually generally pretty slow. Regular (serial) robot arms are usually significantly slower than a human arm. Some parallel robots (ie where the motors are mostly stationary and don’t have to be waved around by other motors), like a SCARA or Delta robot, can go about 2-3x the speed of a human, but the difference isn’t massive (60 vs 150 picks per minute?).

But looms are insane. Their task is simpler, but they can do over 2000 picks per second (!). The yarn in air jet looms can be moving over 200 mph. And even mechanical looms like Rapier looms or projectile looms are super fast. The mechanisms are also super advanced and hard to wrap your mind around. Centuries of optimization of the first really good industrial automation instance will do that, I suppose.

It makes me think we haven’t reached a completely flat plateau in mechanical development. Our robots today are actually pretty primitive compared to where they could... where they really should be. It also shows just how hard I think a lot of futurists have underestimated human mechanical capability. Human dexterity and force density is crazy impressive. Humans are actually super strong, fast, AND precise.

And hard automation like looms are also underestimated vs “robot arms.” Hard automation is so much more effective if you can do it. Just robot arms aren’t that great vs people

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kristov4y ago

The potential with arms and other humanoid robotics is to be able to plug them into existing processes without having to make massive structural changes. Robot arms in car factories look like an evolution from a human production line, rather than a completely redesigned production line (or a mashup of the two). Still, redesigning the production around the robot still makes good sense: consider a dishwashing android vs a regular dishwashing machine. We have had dishwasher tech for a long time but we are still very far from a dishwashing android. It's just that maybe that humanoid robot could also hang up the laundry, look after the kids, drive you to the supermarket etc. There is so much room to grow in the "hard automation" space, where scale makes having specialized machines doable - as opposed to a household having to buy a dishwasher, washing machine, roomba, etc.

zamfi4y ago

Didn't Tesla try this for the Model 3 (a fully-automated factory) and it turned out to be a total disaster?

Are they too far ahead of the curve? Or is it just rare that your task remains identical enough (i.e., textiles) for the decades it takes to optimize hardware?

RobotbeatOP4y ago

A bit of both, I think. To do this is really hard. And requires some changes to how the car is made. Some of these lessons learned are presumably are being introduced into the Model Y, like the single-piece rear casting.

There's also a ton of engineering needed to go into how to make better robots.

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narag4y ago

I made a search in the page for "robots" and got to your comment.

It's also appropiate to put this comment under some other mentioning old tech. Because robots have become steampunk. Very dear to first sci-fi writers, now they're démodé.

As soon as NLP gets another frog leap, we'll start seeing a comeback.

smusamashah4y ago

Where do I read more about looms?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse