[HN Gopher] New physics SIM trains robots 430k times faster than...
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New physics SIM trains robots 430k times faster than reality
Author : elsewhen
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-12-20 10:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| exabrial wrote:
| I believe this is how some robot vacuum companies perfected their
| algorithms 10-15 years ago; basically simulating inputs to the
| software from LIDAR/bump sensors and figuring out how to avoid
| getting the robot "stuck" in your living room.
| ad-astra wrote:
| What companies are they? My Roomba from 3 years ago is awful
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Curious, what makes you say it's awful?
|
| I have a couple roombas from that era. If I sit and watch
| them, their path planning makes no sense. But if I just put
| them on a schedule to clean once a day, and don't think about
| them beyond emptying their bin, I have continuously clean
| floors. Which, for me, is all I care about.
| htrp wrote:
| iirc, they basically avoided fancy routing algos and just
| let the robot haphazardly wander the space (and determined
| that the room was clean after a set number of activations
| for each bumper sensor)
| sigbottle wrote:
| the way you phrased it makes roombas feel so cute lol
| ninkendo wrote:
| Not GP, but I use a Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, which was the
| top of the line model earlier this year. I also just set it
| to run at night when I'm not paying attention to it.
| It's... fine, I guess.
|
| But if there is _anything at all_ on your floor that will
| get stuck in its rollers, it _will_ get stuck on it. Like
| 100% of the time. I've seen everything. Charge cables,
| towels, kids toys, any small pieces of fabric, anything you
| can think of. It has a camera and is supposed to avoid all
| these things, but it straight up never works. I have a
| nightly routine where I clear everything I can from the
| floors to make room for it, and it manages to find the one
| thing I didn't see. And looking at its history it always
| ends up getting stuck in the first 5 minutes which means
| the whole clean is a bust.
|
| I would wager my overall success rate (nights where it does
| its whole job and doesn't get stuck) is maybe 70%. Just
| good enough that it's "worth it" but it's so frustrating
| that it can't simply steer around this stuff, especially
| when it's advertised as being able to.
|
| I could rant about the other stuff I hate about it, but
| suffice to say I still feel that good cleaning robots need
| another 5-10 years before I could fully recommend them.
| pineaux wrote:
| Not enough comments, is this the ushering of a new era of
| robotics? Is everybody going to be replaced now?
| amelius wrote:
| This piece was less about robotics and more about creating cool
| scenery.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (221 points, 3 days ago, 52 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42457213
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| There are self driving car companies doing the same kind of
| training. I know because I spoke to an employee who works at a
| startup that provides this type of software as a service.
| hinkley wrote:
| Strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
|
| How about a nice game of chess?
| thatguysaguy wrote:
| Some cold water on the claims here:
| https://open.substack.com/pub/stoneztao/p/the-new-hyped-gene...
|
| tl;dr: The way they're able to claim a massive speedup is by
| simulating much simpler scenarios than those being simulated by
| other systems.
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(page generated 2024-12-23 23:00 UTC)