Famed Roboticist Says Humanoid Robot Bubble Is Doomed To Burst

In Brief

Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up telephone for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: you’re wasting your money.

Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades astatine MIT, is peculiarly skeptical of companies for illustration Tesla and Figure trying to thatch robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. In a caller essay, he calls this attack “pure imagination thinking.”

The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed pinch astir 17,000 specialized touch receptors that nary robot comes adjacent to matching. While instrumentality learning transformed reside nickname and image processing, those breakthroughs built connected decades of existing exertion for capturing nan correct data. “We don’t person specified a contented for touch data,” Brooks points out.

Then there’s safety. Full-sized stepping humanoid robots pump monolithic amounts of power into staying upright. When they fall, they’re dangerous. Physics intends a robot doubly nan size of today’s models would battalion 8 times nan harmful energy.

Brooks predicts that successful 15 years, successful “humanoid” robots will really person wheels, aggregate arms, and specialized sensors and wantonness nan quality form. Meanwhile, he’s thoroughly convinced that today’s billions are backing costly training experiments that will ne'er standard to wide production.

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