[HN Gopher] Tips for Building and Deploying Robots
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Tips for Building and Deploying Robots
Author : dannyobrien
Score : 91 points
Date : 2024-09-30 05:55 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rodneybrooks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rodneybrooks.com)
| ragebol wrote:
| Some good advice here!
|
| Too often I've heard: why make a robot open doors with it
| manipulator, just install a door opener on the door! Fits the
| bill here exactly: making a better robot helps you scale. Only
| relatively recently that robots opening doors became a reasonable
| thing to ask fo, but not much robots yet that do this at scale I
| think.
| krisoft wrote:
| The true answer is that it is hard, and requies very carefull
| analysis.
|
| Putting a "door opener" on the robot is sometimes at no extra
| marginal cost. (Because it already has a manipulator to
| fullfill its job.) Sometimes it would make the robot cost
| prohibitive, and the correct solution is to use automatic
| doors. Depends on how many doors there are and how many robots,
| and what kind of robot and what kind of door.
|
| Then again even if the correct solution in a particular
| situation is to add door opening manipulators on the robots
| very likely you would only want to support a few different
| kinds of handles. Imagine the complications of trying to
| support all door handles from baroque brass levers through
| modern spherical knobs to dogged doors the kind you find on a
| warship.
| michaelt wrote:
| Outside of research labs and Boston Dynamics, can you point
| me to any robots with door openers?
| KuriousCat wrote:
| This is solid advice, particularly #4 is the reason I have
| started building my own bots. I do have one question though, how
| to design the production pipeline such that it is easy to iterate
| on the bot design with minimal disruption?
| crystalmeph wrote:
| Rapid iteration at the component level would obviously require
| custom components, and maybe vertical integration, which
| clearly conflicts with point #1 about riding existing supply
| chains. But you can still iterate parts of the design that you
| more or less "have" to customize, such as the body material,
| axis geometries, and dozens of other factors I can't think of
| off the top of my head. The collected data can both be used to
| improve training and as input into the design iterations.
| michaelt wrote:
| It depends.
|
| What scale are you operating at, what sort of things do you
| want to iterate on, and how minimal does minimal disruption
| need to be? :)
| alexpotato wrote:
| The post mentions several times how it's both costly for adopter
| to add infrastructure to support robots but also how other forces
| can make that infra already there e.g. how it costs money to
| install wifi in a warehouse but handheld scanners led to wifi
| being in them anyway (which was great for the robots too).
|
| This reminded me of a quote about the future of automated driving
| (paraphrasing):
|
| "We currently consider the following to be distinct and very
| different modes of transportation:
|
| - car
|
| - elevator
|
| - train
|
| At some point, those will all converge into a vehicle that can
| travel on roads (like a car), with other vehicles (like a train)
| and bring you up to a building floor (live an elevator)."
|
| This seemed somewhat true to me until I considered two things:
|
| 1. The smart phone did something similar with a phone,
| television, computer etc
|
| 2. There is a scene in the movie Minority Report that does
| exactly what the author of the original quote described. [0]
|
| The combination of another convergence device AND a fictional
| visual of what that convergent device would like really hammered
| home what the future might look like.
|
| 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the problem with the "car-like-a-train" thing is that trains
| have really high capacity because their crossings are managed
| and they do not decouple/couple at high frequencies, but more
| importantly the people to space ratio is significantly higher,
| particularly since standees take up very little room. when you
| consider that cars need a whole engine for four seated people
| the general end result is that "cars-like-a-train" combines the
| worst of both worlds.
| ozzydave wrote:
| I don't think the second part (about length of the train) is
| accurate at all. Yes, a train made of pods roughly car sized
| would be longer, but only roughly 3x. If you look at the duty
| cycle of say BART rail, you could fit a lot more than 3x
| trains on it. The rail is empty most of the time.
| chfritz wrote:
| Re. infrastructure integration: it's always a cost-benefit
| analysis. I've worked at a robotics company where we integrated
| with doors and elevators. Doors was really easy, cost almost
| nothing, and didn't come with any regulations. Elevators, on the
| other hand, was a length process, required certified elevator
| technicians, and cost a lot of money. On the other hand, adding a
| manipulator to open manual doors is very difficult and costly
| (per robot), but adding a button-pusher for elevator buttons is
| not.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > If we are asking a customer or end-user to do something they
| wouldn't naturally do already we are making it harder for them to
| use our product...
|
| The iRobot product line barely works without rearranging and
| adapting all of your furniture and floor space.
| _diyar wrote:
| Yes but you are not asking them to also buy a 10k USD lidar
| scanner to map their homes.
|
| The core of the argument is: you're already selling an
| expensive robot, don't force your customers to buy a second
| expensive thing.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| What kind of furniture lets the robot vacuum under it and
| around its legs in the place it typically goes? What
| apartments and homes are large enough to have a robot-width
| distance between walls, corners and everything that is on the
| floor? How much do you think Ligne Roset sofas cost? And at
| $1,000/sqft, surely a lidar can be cheap in comparison.
| You're kind of proving my point of how off the mark iRobot
| is.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> What kind of furniture lets the robot vacuum under it
| and around its legs in the place it typically goes? What
| apartments and homes are large enough to have a robot-width
| distance between walls, corners and everything that is on
| the floor?_
|
| This isn't actually a problem.
|
| If the robot vacuum cleaner is 10cm high, any furniture
| where the gap below it is <9cm the robot will detect with
| its bump sensor and avoid. Any furniture where the gap is
| >11cm high, the robot will clean under no problem. The only
| problem is furniture with a gap in the 9-11cm range. For
| that you can either buy a different sized robot, or raise
| or lower the furniture.
|
| Of course you'll have to avoid leaving trailing cables on
| the floor - but that makes your home neater anyway, so no
| problem.
|
| You can buy a Lidar robot if you want, of course - the
| classic random-driving-around Roomba is very much a product
| of its time.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Where does one get part-level information to qualify a supply
| chain as "juicy"?
|
| Otherwise the first advice looks like a 1st-world solution that
| independent 3rd-world developers can't deploy. Could early-stage
| companies even expect this from their investor/connectors?
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Digikey has 32,000 in stock and your search filters yielded
| 100's of nearly identical components from different
| manufacturers. This could mean using 4 pole switches when you
| only need 3 because toggles are typically 1,2, or 4 pole.
| lnsru wrote:
| Digikey is sadly very expensive. It's good for prototype. Or
| expensive industrial equipment. But for consumer goods one
| needs to go to China and source really cheap components
| optimized for large volume manufacturing.
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