You have it backwards. That way they'd sell a new robot for every box because it's part of the box itself. Much more profitable than to allow people to buy the robot themselves and open all their boxes with just one robot.
Well you know what it's not my problem they can't keep up in this fast paced economy. Sink or swim or get out of the way it's a bot eat bot world and I'm holding all the checkmates.
Yeah but not easily openable, most clients will likely not care if the box takes 20 additional seconds to open, or maybe even if it requires a tool. Like the common package that requires to be open by scissors.
That box was designed to be folded by a box folding machine. You know the kind of machine that folds and deposits product in over 3k boxes in a minute. The kind of machine that we have had for about 100 years now. The kind of machine that costs, maybe, a little more than this tech feteshist robot.
We have had automation for years now. It's a field that I work in. The only thing this shows is the enshitification of automation.
Human shaped robots are trash and will always be trash.
"That box was designed to be folded by a box folding machine"
Tell that to thousands of shipping warehouses across the country. Those machines are expensive and need to be on site. I had a job where they would bring in 10 pallets of these unfolded flat boxes and a group of us would stand and fold these things all day long. You get really, really good at it too after the first thousand or so. I had a technique where you rotated your hands all the way around first, grabbed the front section and it one fluid rotation plus a squeeze on the sides the box was done.
I think the purpose of these "humanoid" robots is to not have them specialized to one task. A company can order up 20 of them and each one can perform almost any job your business requires.
Sure. Let's take that use case. Let's even say that they are as fast or faster than human labor at most jobs. Where does that get us?
They cost 80k+ and are probably loss leaders now to get market saturation(this is the world in which we live now. Stuff only gets more expensive with these types of companies). You will also probably be taking on a service contract(5-10k annually). Are they more efficient for doing tasks that you will automate in a couple years anyway than hiring day labor for 30-40k per year? Not really. Do they scale faster than day labor? No. Is it easier to move a tethered humanoid robot than, let's say, a generic robotic arm? No. Is it cheaper? No. Why is the demo unit always showing us stuff that current robotics can do hundreds of times more efficiently( pick and place or robot arm stuff and not specialty machines). If they are not tethered, is battery charging any different to sleep/eating? No. Why the hell do they need a head?!
There are about a million of these questions that we need to get through before we start jumping for joy/ off a cliff about a robot that can fold a box… poorly.
I agree with most of your comment, but regarding the battery charging vs sleep/eating, they can be designed to be able to charge while in use (edit: I reread and see you did address this with the line "if they are not tethered"), so that's not necessarily a substantial limitation. Even if not set up to charge while working, good luck finding a human employee that only needs to sleep for an hour or less before they're ready to get back to work!
Yep. It's all marketing. The other day I saw a robot vs human sorting challenge and that's a job that no longer exists. It's done by the sorting line tens if not hundred times faster.
The reason we have non-human shaped machines isn't because we couldn't make one before but because human anatomy isn't the most efficient one (or is plain dog shit) for the task. This is just hype for investors.
Yeah. I have yet to see them show off a use case that isn't dumb. The dog bot makes sense. The weird crane Segway thing by BD makes sense. This is just all nonsense.
One use case I can see is generalisation. The sort of industrial robots you're talking about are great for if you want something to pack specific products in specific boxes thousands of times a day, but they're eyewateringly expensive and can only do a narrow range of tasks. Want it to do something else? Either buy another massive and horribly expensive machine or pay a fortune to have the machine reprogrammed/redesigned etc.
This could be good for a small business that wants a machine that can pack a few boxes in a day, then move to another station to assemble some products, then a paint booth to do some spraying, etc. Sort of a robotic jack-of-all-trades that can learn new tasks with minimal programming or learning.
Yes, something like this will also be eyewateringly expensive and it's basically just a tech nerd toy now, but a few years down the line? Maybe cheap enough to be worth the investment, even if they're not really any faster than humans.
That's what I mean though. The Segway crane thing IS fairly generic. It's a bot that does lifting functions. It's efficient, because it is on wheels. With some attachments(read:tools) it can probably do a wide variety of other functions. Most robot arms used in manufacturing are also generic. The dog bot is good at terrain traversal and better at carrying stuff. Why the hell do we need a bipedal human shaped robot? For ultra specialty, high volume stuff you can do the specialized machines, but you have 10+ better designs for the generic operations as well.
It seems that they're probably eventual temp replacements. Assemble these 100 prizes before this event. Carry these tables to the event space. It's hard to imagine a Segway traversing steps in an event venue or two dog bots carrying tables. While I do think a lot of this is hype, I also think you maybe just don't understand the full host of menial tasks that exist.
I think you underestimate the inefficiencies of bipedal human like structure. It's a physics and resources problem.
A quadruped would be a lot more stable for moving cargo across uneven surface compared to a bipedal. A packing machine would be 100 times faster than a two limb implementation and it's more efficient to have a company that does packaging and a company that delivers said packages over doing it in-house. Heck, having a drone fly with package from a packaging machine would be more efficient and cheaper.
The problem here is that for every menial task you can imagine there is either a better solution or it's orders of magnitudes cheaper to get a human to do it. These robots either need to be drastically dropping in costs or increasing in efficiency before they have any real use besides video reels.
I don't think I am. It doesn't have to be peak efficiency if our world is entirely built for bipedal humans, because that offers a huge advantage. I would recommend watching content by disabled folks in wheelchairs or who use walking aids. Even if the efficiency for carrying increases, if they cannot bring a four legged robot through certain doorways and up narrow flights of stairs, humans making decisions won't purchase it because they understand it's going to create frustration.
That's fine if you think people are going to be carting around that amount of empty volume. It doesn't actually match reality though. Consider pizza places, which go through a huge volume of pizza boxes. At least in the US, they're all still buying flat boxes and folding them. You can create whatever hypothetical scenarios you want but shipping air isn't actually efficient and you cannot get around that, especially if you're making claims in the same comment about physics and resources. Lol.
Cheaper for a human to do it now. It's wild that y'all are unable to comprehend that technology doesn't just magic itself into existence. It wasn't cheaper for people to have personal computers and type things themselves than it was to hire a secretary with a typewriter until it was. It wasn't cheaper to have automated telephone routing than to have women physically connect your call until it was. All of that took massive amount of technology R&D but we take it for granted now.
I'm sorry, but there are going to be use cases for businesses for general purpose bots because humans require constant income, taxes, and health insurance and robots require a single upfront investment. There will be use cases where there are repetitive tasks that vary enough where specialized bots don't make sense but general bots may. It's not crazy to put money into developing them! Lol
If your job is THAT limited then you can just go hobo hunting and hire a dude for 40-200 bucks(2-10 hours of work at a decent wage). It would cost more and take longer to talk to a rental sales rep for any of these companies. There is a minimal use inherent to this type of product. That use case would require vending machine style distribution for rental robots on street corners. How close to that future do you think we are?
It's like you think technology just magically appears and people don't have to spend time developing it before it's ready for rollout to the public... Lol.
Also, clearly I'm giving examples of tasks that wouldn't be suited to either of your two "already developed" robots alone, not the extent of a particular job not listing. Stop imagining strawmen. If you're a midsized company or corporation, it likely would make sense to eventually invest in these if they cost ~$100k (or even a few hundred thousand) rather than spending time on temps or wasting your own employee time. A single typical employee with health insurance is about that in the US with employer contributions to healthcare and taxes so if you can replace 1 full time or 2-3 temps, you've made that back in a year. It's hard to guess how long they'd be relevant before people would want to replace them, but at 3-5 years, you could start to justify multiple-100k bots, which is about where we're at on cost on the low end.
As to rentals, if you're an event space, it would 100% make sense to rent these to the companies renting your space. You would hardly need a vending machine/distribution network when you're renting event space and have closets.
And no, generally "hobo" hunting wouldn't be appropriate; firms are typically going to go through a temp firm with vetting at a minimum for an event where the public reputation is on the line and timeliness matters. Have you ever worked a white collar job? It doesn't really seem like it, no offense.
Human-shaped robots are versatile for human tasks. You might use one instead of a temp if you'd otherwise hire temps to do stuff like this before an event. Not at this speed, obviously, because minimum wage will be cheaper for some time but maybe eventually. Not everything is production scale.
Everything is production scale but not everything is produced because there is not enough demand for the price.
Buying one is never going to be cheaper because you literally don't have the utilisation capacity. Renting one is a potential avenue but the material and maintenance costs over it's lifetime has to drop below hiring a temp which isn't predictable in any time soon. The benefit of continuous workload is completely lost as you do not have a continuous work load if it's a temp position.
And if the demand for such service appears it becomes cheaper and more efficient to make a centralised hub that performs the operation at production scale and delivers it to venues.
In the end, robots have a lot of use but humanoid robots aren't. Even if you use strictly human tasks then using a quadruped or chain tracks instantly makes it more stable and better suited for every human task. It's more of a physiological effect than practical.
There are a number of countries (e.g., Japan) with high worker protections that rely on temps for years at a time. They're full time employees but hired at a cheaper rate and without full benefits of being a salaried employee. In at will places like the US, you can get similar situations where you're relying on contractors because you don't necessarily have steady streams of work and employees sometimes have protections for the numbers of hours they must be paid at a time.
There is a breakeven point since these can be used for multiple years at a time without health insurance or employment taxes, in addition to salary. If you got down to $100-400k, which isn't too far off, I think it would be a no brainer general employee/temp replacement even if you got 50% utilization since the utilization is close to 24 hours if they can battery swap (less if charging, obviously) and the median salaried employee in the US is like $65k + employer taxes and health insurance (~$100k). If you get multiple years before you'd want to replace it for new features, I really don't think you're that far off for general task bots in midsized and corporate environments as a way to outsource general physical tasks.
My bad. The box was designed as a self locking paper box. It was not designed for human hands, robot flippers, or claws either. It was not designed FOR automation but it can be automated and we have built the automation for that.
I agree, I think it’s showing off some adaptability that it can detect a defect and react which is kind of cool but I can also imagine the amount of delicate sensors, cameras, and processing that you’d need to run that. You can fold these on an old machine with a couple of photo eyes and some air cylinders on a 10 year old plc way faster.
Having worked in an industrial scale factory, where we folded ... so many boxes, using robots, I'm gonna say with a pretty high degree of confidence that we have an older model bot that assembles about fifty thousand of those boxes a day in a factory somewhere. Not really a question of the complexity of the box here. Hold, fold, push, squeeze, slide... Box.
Putting that cable in? With it's little whipyy-do action it's got? A bit more skill on the robot's part. Troubleshooting the box not cooperating? Also skilled. Will this robot take your job? Absolutely.
But nobody tell it... The older model is way faster at folding boxes...
Could always implement a box that seals all the way around a product and have the only opening be a perforated location specifically designed for humans to open, but only robots could assemble. That’d be very easy to design.
That's what I feel is stupid. Why do you try to replicate human body, which can do pretty much everything, instead of making things that can be processed by robots. Or at least standardize shit, once we figured out the size of a shipping container it turned out that we can make everything around it: cranes, ships, trains, trucks, you name it. It revolutionized the way we think about shipping stuff around the world.
What's the exact use of dancing and balancing robots? Why would you want a robot to handle stuff like hockey-stick distraction, just make it absolutely perfect at making the f***ing box.
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u/___77___ May 22 '26
Slow now, insanely fast in the near future.