Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym.
Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?
>if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym
Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.
A fully open-source humanoid arm for physical
AI research and deployment in contact-rich
environments.
Lerobot banked on having full DL control of each joint so they wouldn't have to do that properly, but now VLAs just use inverse kinematics as a crutch and predict gripper offsets, so we're back to square one.
Intimacy between people in a long distance relationship: that's the killer app.
Uh, the main site appears to be down (and most wouldn't click on the link, given it's name) - but you can read about a project here:
My intimacy with my partner in a short difference marriage would improved it we could eliminate folding washing from the weekly chores.
I think it's funny how often "Folding Laundry" is brought up as the critical use case as if that's a labor function that needs to be done in the first place!
Some of us already live in the Utopia of not folding laundry!
I'm not advocating, but pointing out how silly it is that the supposed linchpin of the end of human labor is a completely voluntary and unnecessary task. I get why it can be a good example, because it's common and "hard" in that computery way that seems like it shouldn't be that hard, and that it's supposed to represent all the other hard problems of housework.
But we know what the household robot industry considers "solved" to look like, and I'm not that satisfied with roombas, and knowing that, is $6000 for something that could fold your laundry really that much better a proposition than just being wrinkly sometimes? Downey produces a product that you spray on a clothing item and stretch it and it stops being wrinkly. Totally unnecessary, but way cheaper than $6000.
folding is a hard middle step in the laundry process, but the job is end to end
intimacy over onlyfans with a guy in india pretending to be the woman is the proper killer app.
I want to toss dirty laundry into a hopper and have it come out clean and folded at the other end.
There is no reason to use my existing washer and dryer that are designed for human use.
God, not to mention how home are designed around the two-machine space.
If a somewhat affordable robot can fold some of your laundry in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden there are a lot more new and useful things it can do as well. It's a metric.
Plus there are also people who don't like folding laundry. Like me.
I see, is it like arc agi but for robots? wouldn't the companies just laundryfold-maxx their robots then?
- "Robots – Comprehensive catalog of 115 humanoid and quadruped robots" re: MJCF in mujoco_menagerie, awesomerobots, robot-descriptions/awesome-robot-descriptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727432
- I can think of at least one museum that already has interactive demo robot arms that are in need of repair or replacement