[HN Gopher] Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Control
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Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Author : moatmoat
Score : 90 points
Date : 2024-12-18 00:44 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exbody2.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (exbody2.github.io)
| throwup238 wrote:
| That Unitree G1 [1] in the video starts at $16k, which surprised
| me. I'm guessing end effectors drive that price way up but it
| feels like we are maybe a decade away from useful household
| humanoid robots for the price of a cheap car, which would put it
| well within the means of many in the developed world.
|
| Does anyone have any insight on how realistically far away the
| control and programming is from that reality? A bunch of very
| impressive robotic control model research has been posted on HN
| in the last two years but as an outsider it's hard to evaluate
| just how close we are to doing away with folding clothes by
| general purpose humanoid robot.
|
| [1] https://www.unitree.com/mobile/g1
| modeless wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that $16k is aspirational at this point. See
| "Contact us for the real price" here:
| https://shop.unitree.com/products/unitree-g1
|
| I've heard that the real price is more like $35k. And you
| probably want options that increase the price more. For example
| on one of their dog robots I believe the base price doesn't
| include detailed control over the limbs, so you can only use
| their included software to walk it around.
|
| Still though, even the higher price is pretty good. Hard to see
| how China doesn't dominate humanoids given their manufacturing
| advantage and the sheer number of humanoid companies there now.
| Dozens!
| alsodumb wrote:
| Someone I know got it recently. If you're getting with the
| API and all the sensors it was close to 60k including customs
| and all of that.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I would buy that today if the battery life was not abysmal.
| It is though; that is, at least for me, a far larger issue
| than all else. We cannot make laptops or phones work an
| entire day; robots/drones are measured in minutes.
| modeless wrote:
| What would you use it for that needs long battery life?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Shopping (which takes hours where I live), picking olives
| (it will take forever if you have to hop into the charger
| every 15 minutes), carrying my backpack on walks etc.
| ben_w wrote:
| For shopping, surely the best robotic option are the
| various things the huge warehouses use, rather than
| havingthan a humanoid going around a store meant for
| humans?
|
| Both the things that look like Roombas and all these:
| https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE?si=9mCtiKKkk_N9Uk7z
|
| No single consumer would buy all that, but the retailers
| can.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think for most indoor household work they only really
| need enough to move from station to station. Once they
| are at the bed to fold clothes or in the kitchen washing
| dishes, they should be able to plug themselves in.
|
| That's way too limited for $60k though. I'd pay $20k even
| if it had to plug itself in for most jobs, assuming it
| was decent at cable management and could manage its own
| extension cord in other situations.
|
| I would pay double that if it were capable of
| household/office/workshop reorganization and managing
| storage with a live inventory of where it put all the
| crap it cleans up. It's not quite at the point where it
| would be a positive ROI financially (assuming $80k TCO
| over 5-10 years) but it'd make life a _lot_ more
| convenient and lower the activation energy for a ton of
| hobbies.
| demarq wrote:
| Nope the price is not "up".
|
| For reference the spot robot from Boston dynamics starts at 74k
| usd.
|
| So you could literally have a team of humanoids for the price
| of a spot.
| ben_w wrote:
| The Unitree links claim a 9000mAh battery will last it 2 hours;
| I don't know the voltage, but even at 5.5 V cells, that's only
| about 25 W average power consumption.
|
| I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very
| low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on
| battery capacity.
|
| My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose
| robots will need at least as much compute as a self-driving car
| (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at most 1/10th the
| available power to do that (because they're physically
| smaller).
|
| Between algorithmic improvements and Koomey's law, I think this
| will take at least 5 years between any given category of
| customer being able to afford no-steering-wheel-needed self
| driving cars, and the equivalent for androids.
|
| Given the Waymos were doing geo-fenced cars with no safety
| drivers in the vehicles in 2017 (but still had an employee in
| the back with access to an emergency stop button)*, this gap is
| compatible with the recent press releases and youtube videos
| going around about robotics -- but as nobody has yet started
| actually shipping this level of self-driving cars directly to
| end users**, my only guess for _personal_ general-purpose
| domestic androids is: some time after 2030 as a minimum, but
| probably later than that.
|
| * https://phys.org/news/2017-11-waymo-autonomous-vans-human-
| dr...
|
| ** No, Tesla's current one doesn't count; it will only count
| when it actually ships without a steering wheel _or_ when
| people are actually _allowed_ to use it while sleeping.
| hwillis wrote:
| You misunderstand battery specs. It's a 13 string (more
| commonly, 13s) battery- a string is a number of cells wired
| in series. By convention that's a 48 volt battery, which
| matches with the 54 volt charger. In total that's a 421 watt-
| hour battery, for an average power of ~210 watts over 2
| hours.
|
| When you connect 2 9000 mAh cells in series, the resulting
| battery has 2x the voltage but the same mAh capacity. In
| parallel, the battery has the same voltage but 2x the mAh.
|
| > My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-
| purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-
| driving car (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at
| most 1/10th the available power to do that (because they're
| physically smaller).
|
| This seems logically flawed:
|
| 1. A car travels hundreds of miles from home. Why would a
| robot walk more than a while from a transport or home base?
| At short distances, if you truly need that power, it probably
| makes more sense to stream data/video over a direct low-
| latency connection. Long distance networking has a latency
| comparable to camera frame time, but even a normal wifi
| router can keep a lower latency than human nerve delay.
|
| 2. Humanoid robots will never be running at 85 mph past a
| bunch of people. They probably don't need to have the same
| compute throughput as a car, and definitely don't need to
| have the same reaction time.
| ben_w wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification, that makes a lot more sense
| -- 210 W / 421 Wh suddenly makes it seem totally reasonable
| on both counts.
| berikv wrote:
| Correcting the correction:
|
| > When you connect 2 9000 mAh cells in series, the
| resulting battery has 2x the voltage but the same mAh
| capacity. In parallel, the battery has the same voltage but
| 2x the mAh.
|
| The relevant units are:
|
| * Capacity (Q, in mAh, Ah, kWh, etc)
|
| * Power (P, in Watts)
|
| * Voltage (U, in Volts)
|
| * Current (I, in Amperes)
|
| * Duration (t, in mostly measured in hours)
|
| And the relevant formulas are:
|
| * P = U x I or Power equals Voltage(difference) times
| Current
|
| * Q = P x t or Capacity equals Power times duration
|
| From this we can establish that connecting batteries in
| series or in parallel will not change their Capacity. When
| having 13 batteries of 29000mAh, or 29Ah, you have 13 x 29
| = 377Ah or 377000mAh. Connecting batteries in series or
| parallel does make a difference in voltage and current: a
| string in series will increase the voltage while keeping
| the current the same (theoretically, in practice you get
| less than the current of the weakest cell); a parallel
| setup will increase the maximum current while keeping the
| voltage the same (again, in theory).
| ldoughty wrote:
| The only thing I don't like about car comparisons here is
| that, unlike cars, a household robot could have a plugged in
| offloaded computer. The robot could be stripped to sensors
| and motors, and whatever is necessary for failsafe operation,
| such as remaining balanced. Most other things a household
| robot will do could handle latency limiting it to a few
| hundred updates per second, and you could generally engineer
| around that latency... So the only power you need on the
| robot is enough to control the motors and sensors, and the
| limited onboard compute.
|
| Edit: to clarify, my expectation is that the compute is on-
| location, so the latency is in the scale of <1ms more so than
| 10-100ms from cloud offloading
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I don't understand which things are real and which are
| simulations.
|
| https://youtu.be/sE4cEfhVOdE?si=FYXrtt-lvr0EEqtV&t=48
|
| That part of the video has been heavily edited somehow, at the
| very least.
|
| https://youtu.be/sE4cEfhVOdE?si=OsHygaSqG_mgjygp&t=93
|
| Also looks fake to me.
| dmicah wrote:
| The first clip just seems like they blurred the background for
| that shot. Maybe because there were people walking in the
| background, they felt they needed to obscure them.
| euvin wrote:
| I wonder when we'll get the equivalent of fat padding and skin
| nerves on humanoid robots. Would that help make them less
| "waddly"?
| thecupisblue wrote:
| While impressive at first, this still needs depth, i.e. the
| movements resemble the sample, but there is a giant lack of
| details (information) in those movements.
|
| They are more of a "compressed version of a common denominator
| for these movements". I.e. while sample walking seems more joyful
| and proud, aking to strutting, the robot one seems akin to
| stumbling.
|
| Looking at the fighting movements - the nuances not picked up by
| the simulation and the robot are highly important and are what
| makes the punch a punch instead of a weird shove, what makes a
| good stance vs bad stance. Just like the walking nuances swing it
| from "happy" to "drunk" to "threatening", so do they for others.
|
| While I understand the issue of compression from "real movement
| -> digitally constrained simulation -> physically constrainted
| robot", just want to bring it up as attention to those details
| will probably be important to general training. While at this
| stage it is not that big of a deal, in any kind of real
| environment they will define the human-robot interaction and
| robot-env interaction.
|
| Otherwise great job!
| micw wrote:
| Compared with other robots, it looks very impressive. Compared
| with living things, it looks ... well, could be better. Compared
| with human waltz dancers - I'd say it was a bad idea to use this
| as a reference.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Compared with living things, it looks ... well, could be
| better.
|
| Sometimes it's fun to be cyberpunk-contrarian, diving into all
| the ways our standard equipment--even "just" an arm or leg--is
| actually incomprehensibly complex nanotechnology that we can't
| even begin to match with artificial means, satisfying dozens of
| difficult requirements like "float in water instead of dying"
| or "self-lubricating with limited self-repair" or "destroys
| invading nanomachines."
| illwrks wrote:
| That's impressive! Between the advancement in robotics,
| chat/voice AI, and image generation it's going to become so hard
| to distinguish fiction from reality in a few years. You'll just
| have to see things in person to trust they are real.
| nojvek wrote:
| Most of the folks on modern AI/robotics paper have Asian names.
|
| It seems Asian tiger countries may lead the next century. They
| are very hungry to win the solar, battery, EV, robotics race.
|
| Impressive results.
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