Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games (opens in new tab)

I was 100% with you until suddenly this technical claim pops out. You might feel this way, and might be right, but why? Changing a diaper is crazy hard, I absolutely agree, but you seem to be just declaring from vibes that we 'require an entirely different kind of robotics'. Can you put your finger on why this is true?

Not nitpicking for the fun of it - I'm genuinely interested. Robot person.

That machine will look like a bean bag couch in rough shape of a giant human hand, with few of cooperative work robotic arms. The couch part hugs and secures all limbs of the baby to into the party escort submission position, then the cobots move in to find the disassembly markers on the diaper to tear it open to remove it. Then a showerhead, then a hair dryer, then baby powder sprayer can be brought out and ran to clean any residues and take care of rashes. Finally, the new diaper can be brought in, baby wrapped, and the double sided tapes on it lightly pressed on to secure it.

The entire machine would probably cost less than 10 million USD per unit if mass produced at reasonable scales, and most technological elements needed in such machines would be readily available.

that is when we think about 2 handed robots. 6 handed robot can easily have 2-3 hands assigned to tightly keeping the baby. Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans which is really an artificial constraint. After all we aren't building airplanes using birds as the blueprint.

On the similar note - while not about baby, was just rewatching an early Bing Bang Theory season with this episode where Howard "falls right into the mechanical hand"

Nearly every surgeon used advanced robots to assist with surgeries. My uncle does kidney transplants and he uses robots, so do most surgeons.

For robots to be developed, someone must pay for it. Doctors get skill++ with the surgery robots. There may be vasectomy robots that assist with circumcision, or some actively being developed that doctors would pay for. That would be a far more interesting development than changing diapers. Unless extremely competent and skilled people ( +1000/hour) need them for their work, they won't be developed, so I don't think a diaper changing robot is being developed.

State of the art seems to be that they can untangle a loosely knotted cord.

Untying a short rope with a tightly pulled overhand knot in the middle seems like it's decades away. You have to be able to grip it well enough, then twist the rope and push (even though every physicist says pushing a rope is impossible).

Oh, and load/unload dishwasher. Same with laundry machines. Along with folding laundry, these are the domestic robot equivalents of 'de-mining' and 'search and rescue': the classic motivating use cases for mobile autonomous robots.

You need to manipulate a large sheet, and you probably need to move around, bend down and lean over to reach all the corners. Bonus points for neat hospital corners on a flat sheet.

Putting pillows in pillowcases is another fun one. Usually pretty easy, probably a bronze medal.

Gold medal: put a UK super king size duvet inside a duvet cover. It's huge and awkward, there are buttons, and it's almost but not quite square (why??) so there's a good chance you'll get it round the wrong way and have to rotate it 90 degrees.

Gold Medal: Separate the egg white from the yolk!

Consider examples using building tools like screwing in a drywall screw, or hammering a nail, using a paint roller, caulking a sink, minor plumbing repair with a torch and solder. These differ enough in terms of forces, state changes, and combined dexterity/acuity (two-handed proprioception) from the windex, sandwich and key examples

Ikea product assembly for gold medal.

It can also create a good time of a story - open the door to get the grocery delivery, unpack the delivery etc.

I’ll likely use some of your tests for our robotics (not just humanoid) testing in the future at least as some baselines.

Also I really liked you dressing up as a robot - that’s very fun and really reflects the point of robotics: replace human action for all tasks.

My suggestion: Identify a collapsed person in the home and render first aid (I need this because I have epilepsy and live alone)

Bronze: ID collapse and call emergency services

Silver: Bronze tasks + manipulate person into appropriate recovery position

Gold: Communicate details to emergency personnel and playback previous hours of interactions

something requiring co-ordination between 2 robots. think relay race which the olympics has. So say, moving a couch together.

btw love the idea and the silver body suit. good stuff.

What I think is missing is marathon events. Biathalons and Triathalons.

We all know LLMs have a rather limited context window. Thus seeing robots do longer chains of events would be interesting to see that they're capable than a possibly rigged demo.

Something like: move a stack of boxes from one room to another. The boxes at the end also need to be stacked up. or how about pick up a box, go up some stairs, open a door, and put the box on a shelf on the other side.

Also, the real world is sloppy and messy and dirty and, to be real, kinda janky sometimes. Gold for unlocking a door with a key at a well-maintained office complex, (and opening it, and walking through it) is one thing, because facilities is going to replace the lock before it gets old and needs replacing, and we can assume the door fits in the frame properly so it doesn't need to be shoved or lifted up or yanked in order to be opened is easier than. But the real world is messy and sloppy and you gotta jiggle the key in just the right way in order to get it to work.

Closing the door (assuming the robots weren't raised in a robot barn) is also harder than it looks if the door is shitty and needs a proper slam in order to be fully closed. Also, the robot locking the door behind itself after it comes in. Scanning a key card and opening a door, but the first try fails.

We're a long way from a general robot that can screw a simple screw together like you would to assemble Ikea furniture.

Object recognition.

Gather only the dishes from a messy coffee table and put them in the dish bin.

Pick up only the clothes from a messy floor and bed, and put them in the hamper.

Dump a hamper of clothes onto a table, and sort out stuff that doesn't want to go into the washing machine.

Terrain traversal.

Just walk 500 ft, but theres increasing levels of obstacles in the way.

We all saw Boston dynamics robot parkour videos, but what I want to see is a robot make it from the front door of Simpsons house to the kitchen in the back, but it's got to go through the living room, but it's hella messy, with Maggie and Bart and Lisa’s crap strewn all over, Homer’s got some beer bottles, some empty, some full, all over the floor and on the table, and all the robot has to do is walk from one side of the room to the far side of the room without stepping on anything, or knocking anything over. (Simpsons merely being a home layout that's familiar to most people. Doesn't need to actually be them.)

Ducking under a low ceiling. Climb over a barrier, of varying shapes and sizes.

Other loocomotion. how much weight in its arms in front of it, holding a 5-lb briefcase with one hand while walking. Can it carry something on its back? What's the limit? Can it give piggyback rides?

A category for simulated. Let companies show off their robot's kinematics control systems, so have something on the level of CoppeliaSim, so the motors and the gears and the actuators are themselves simulated, vs a simple 3d video game where they are not. Plug their model into the simulated robot and see how well it just walks. If we remember QWOP, it's harder than it looks!

Obviously it's not going to be totally 100% accurate to the real world. The benefit of this is it lets people complete from all over world without having to replicate a very specific setup in the physical world, and compete from wherever they live am not have to fly to your facility to test, opening up a whole new world of contestants because they can now compete because they can afford it now.

At the end of the day, the most important challenge is, can it pick up a battery from the shelf, swap it with one of the two in its chassis, and put the dead one it just pulled out onto the charger?

Bacteria can do a number on people... Kept telling the wife to not cross contaminate jars, and other products. But you know, she knows better...

Wife was eating some fish in can, puts spoon back (with lovely saliva bacteria), puts in fridge "i wil eat tomorrow", 2 days later she eats the leftover.

She enjoyed a hour+ of "fun" muscles contracting stomach cramps to the point it was almost hospital time. Learned her lesson, well, ... for fish.

Its always like "but i do not like to keep using fresh utensils". I am always: "the dishwasher does not care if it 20 or 40 utensils". Its the same amount of wash and cost. So stop trying to recycle utensils!

1. Force. Walking, running, fighting, doing backflips, etc. all allow for large amounts of force, without a lot of dynamic precision required. Many common tasks require precise and dynamic force. E.g. for washing a window, pushing too hard breaks the glass while pushing too softly will leave streaks.

2. Environment interaction. Most reliable humanoid robots do minimal environment interaction beyond self-balancing. They walk/run/jump in environments that are largely open, with usually convex blocky obstacles. The real world has lots of tasks that require processing beyond low-resolution maps of solid/open space. E.g. I'd want to see a robot that can walk through a forest: jumping/stepping over thin branches that are hard to see, ducking under fallen logs, pushing though bendy branches without breaking them, avoiding ground that is muddy, and seeing through the current obstacle to determine if the obstacle beyond is traversable.

Just to reiterate, I don't see fast progress being made on doing these tasks reliably. It's easy to show 1/N success rate, and much much harder to show ~N/N success rate on these dynamic tasks.