Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

Oh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.

That feels so low of a price when compared to the insane valuation people attribute to Tesla robots

Softbank is bleeding money and they need cash, AI isn't shaping up to what they thought it would be

I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated.

It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor.

What remains unautomated, then?

The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditional robots.

This is where this new generation of robotics comes in. This is the kind of task they're designed to do: "a task that's still done by a human in a high automation environment". Universal robots are angling for the tasks that are impossible or uneconomical to automate with traditional industrial robots.

I took a tour of the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg body shop. It's heavily automated with industrial robots inside safety cages. But they still have human workers pick up parts from rolling carts and place them into templates for the robot arms. BMW has been running a trial with Figure humanoid robots to automate that remaining piece. Apparently those robots haven't worked very well, but presumably Hyundai thinks they can do it better?

https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...

Humanoidal robots make sense when they need to operate in spaces designed for humans bodies. Cars are designed and built to be used and serviced by humans, especially their interiors so you need humanoid robot to automate building them. Car exteriors are not built for humans to interact with so they are already being built by specialized robots.

Custom built robots are expensive (basically an R&D project in themselves) and inflexible, if you want to update the process you have to redesign your automated system. The dream of humanoid robots is they can adapt to new manufacturing processes like human workers.

Two things: 1) we have abundant training data for humanoid embodiments (watch humans do things), and 2) the world is already designed for humans.

Training data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…

I understand the sentiment, but you assume they are planning to build humanoid robots to walk around the human-oriented space in the factory.

Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?

Because a humanoid robot can replace (theoretically) any human worker, whereas a purpose-built robot can only replace one kind of worker. Or at least that's what Asimov said in Caves of Steel.

Maybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.

I'm spitballing here as I don't actually have a concrete answer for you. But from my understanding automobile manufacturing is one of if not THE most advanced 'purpose-built' robotics sectors. While I agree with you that having a purpose-built thing usually wins out for assembly line manufacturing, I wonder if this isn't an attempt to branch out away from single-purpose robotics into more general or multi-faceted manufacturing.

I'm looking for a better video of it (from one of the engineers), but look at the NASA robot hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfDXzkFHnz0

https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+robonaut+video+hand+why...

The gist of it is that all tools on the spacecraft (eg: space-drill, space-coffee-maker, space-airlock) are all designed to fit a gloved human astronaut hand. Waaaaay more complicated to make a robo-hand than a robo-suction cup or robo-claw, but then you are matching the environment, and guarantee tool compatibility against all extant tasks!

We already have specialized robots on earth... paper slicer, lawn mower, bazooka, whatever. They're all machines that are specialized for the task at hand, we're not making a humanoid robot that gets down on all fours and individually plucks blades of glass.

The car factories already have specialized robots... they're not mimicking a human hand holding a can of spray paint, shaking it up, and painting the car that way... it's a 6-axis arm, or a whole "grab the car and flip it while spraying paint" system.

It's not about inventing purpose-specific robots, it's about handling that long-tail of "stuff with tools that a human is designed to be able to use." Go over there, push that button. Go move that box from table1 to table2. Etc.

For well defined tasks in the factory domain, make a "real robot". For ad-hoc tasks in the interim... strap an LLM to a camera, battery, robo-legs and arms, cross your fingers, and hope for the best?

I think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product.

I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.

Our'legacy' world is built for human shsped operation. So a generic operator will hsve to mimic human shape.

The human form IS the most optimal way to do most tasks

The first somewhat general purpose humanoid robot will sell like gangbusters to the rich, even just as a parlor toy/trick.

That's like saying there's no need for a generic CPU. The only way forward is a ASIC. Once a generic CPU does everything well enough, it's extremely versatile.

They have god knows how manny bajillion dollars tied up in machinery designed for human use, a human can step in when the robot breaks, and they can buy more robots if the humans get uppity. Those seem like a bunch of good reasons to me.

The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it

Patient complex moves first.

You don’t understand because you’re not an expert? First off they have numerous non-humanoid robots if you follow them at all. Second, Clearly they’ve got strong reasoning, they’ve just been bought. Third, out of thousands of attempts at humanoids, their robots are seemingly the best we’ve yet seen in this class. They must be doing it right when so few others got any traction.

This same nonsensical question again. Because the world is built for humans, because these are general purpose to replace a human laborer. It can immediately go from picking up parts in a factory to mowing the lawn in the same day.

> they need to be useful

They would be. When everything what could be done would be done by a robot. 24/7. Even without the lights on the floor.

Why do you need software when FPGA can solve everything.

It's much cheaper to create one general-purpose robot for everything than many different robots, each optimized to each task.

Robot Chicken had a fairly cynical take on this. I won't link it here.

There are plenty of tasks a relatively weak humanoid robot is well suited for. Basically any task that is 'human shaped' and not worth an automated line.

There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company.

My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts.

Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal.

This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high.

Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?

Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.

2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company.

Take a step back and look at this article's diction and the rest of this entire website. Completely AI generated.

All those tokens have to go somewhere

Generating an image from an already open tab is faster than making a search engine query and selecting a good, high resolution image.

Who cares about quality. Speed is the new black.

The text reads LLM-ish as well.

And figure out usage and licensing and all that crap. So much easier to just generate a brand new image.

So true. I hear they replace more engines than any other brand. I'm surprised they sell so well; a used Toyota would be a far better choice than a new Hyundai

Luckily they have a 10 year 100k mile warranty.

Hyundai EVs are great though, the Hyundai Ionic 5N is probably the best EV there is (for car enthusiasts).

rnteresting part is defense although the economics and power/range limits its practicality.

the other timing here is the increasingly belligerent union who are demanding pretty outrageous compensation for what a typical American worker would make. I think the goal is to immediately automate the workforce and move the plants out of korea speaking to insiders.

Nope, Hyundai already owned it, they’re just going to 100%

Outside of some military applications and maybe search and rescue, a lot of people kind of freaked out about Boston Dynamics. They have cool robots, sure, but at what cost if they are implemented by a bad actor? No thanks.

I don't think that follows. Hyundai could well sell these after they've dogfooded them for a while.

Car factories seem to be a pretty good initial market, given that Tesla is doing Optimus and Figure has humanoids in a BMW factory. But the whole point is that these are general purpose robots, and there are lots of other factories. By the time that market is saturated they'll be capable of more.

If it's disappointing then it's been disappointing for over 5 years, since Hyundai has owned the company for 5 years.