[HN Gopher] Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games
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Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games
Author : robobenjie
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-10-16 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (generalrobots.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (generalrobots.substack.com)
| robobenjie wrote:
| Hey Hacker News. Curious if folks feel like I'm missing
| categories of challenge.
| mjq7 wrote:
| How about something with unpacking items from a shopping bag, i
| suspect the difference in bags (standard plastic, reusable etc)
| and certain items can really crank the difficulty.
|
| It can also create a good time of a story - open the door to
| get the grocery delivery, unpack the delivery etc.
| meeech wrote:
| something requiring navigating stairs while holding something
| full like a laundry basket. bronze - straight stairs, silver -
| one 90deg turn. gold - spiral.
|
| something requiring co-ordination between 2 robots. think relay
| race which the olympics has. So say, moving a couch together.
|
| btw love the idea and the silver body suit. good stuff.
| robobenjie wrote:
| Ooh. I like full body manipulation. Humans use hips & elbows
| to move laundry baskets. Two robot collaboration is good too.
| I wonder who I can convince to wear another silver suit....
| :)
| levocardia wrote:
| Maybe careful application of large amounts of force? Opening a
| jar, peeling garlic, splitting a squash, opening a soda can.
| This category seems like a good test of "grip" strength + force
| feedback + sense of touch.
| amirhirsch wrote:
| I like these benchmarks and the videos are funny!
|
| Consider examples using building tools like screwing in a
| drywall screw, or hammering a nail, using a paint roller,
| caulking a sink, minor plumbing repair with a torch and solder.
| These differ enough in terms of forces, state changes, and
| combined dexterity/acuity (two-handed proprioception) from the
| windex, sandwich and key examples
|
| Ikea product assembly for gold medal.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I'd go for something in the manipulation of ropes or wires.
|
| State of the art seems to be that they can untangle a loosely
| knotted cord.
|
| Untying a short rope with a tightly pulled overhand knot in the
| middle seems like it's decades away. You have to be able to
| grip it well enough, then twist the rope and push (even though
| every physicist says pushing a rope is impossible).
| robobenjie wrote:
| Interesting. Futurism is super hard, but "decades" too far
| away to me. I think with strong 2 finger grippers this is
| probably close to state of the art, especially with a wrist
| force sensor, like the TRI setup.
| calepayson wrote:
| Belaying a climber would be a hilarious (and fraught) gold
| medal challenge.
| inasio wrote:
| There are already robots that do that (autobelayers)...
| tintor wrote:
| Not really.
|
| Auto belay device can't hold the climber up on the wall,
| like human belayer can, so that climber can rest and try
| again.
|
| Auto belay device can't do lead belay.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Robots currently do things easy and faster to do for robot but
| difficult to do for man.
| tintor wrote:
| threading a needle (different thread thickness and hole sizes)
| vasco wrote:
| Carving a wooden spoon in hand.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Standard evening family home tidy/reset - toys, books, clothes,
| shoes away in their places. All over the house.
|
| Oh, and load/unload dishwasher. Same with laundry machines.
| Along with folding laundry, these are the domestic robot
| equivalents of 'de-mining' and 'search and rescue': the classic
| motivating use cases for mobile autonomous robots.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I love your list and it makes me think we are so far away from
| these things ever being feasible/cost effective compared to
| just hiring a poor person to do it. And the world is making a
| lot of poor people right now.
| fragmede wrote:
| (HN link on Substack points at empty page instead of this one,
| at least before I made this comment.)
|
| What I think is missing is marathon events. Biathalons and
| Triathalons.
|
| We all know LLMs have a rather limited context window. Thus
| seeing robots do longer chains of events would be interesting
| to see that they're capable than a possibly rigged demo.
|
| Something like: move a stack of boxes from one room to another.
| The boxes at the end also need to be stacked up. or how about
| pick up a box, go up some stairs, open a door, and put the box
| on a shelf on the other side.
|
| Also, the real world is sloppy and messy and dirty and, to be
| real, kinda janky sometimes. Gold for unlocking a door with a
| key at a well-maintained office complex, (and opening it, and
| walking through it) is one thing, because facilities is going
| to replace the lock before it gets old and needs replacing, and
| we can assume the door fits in the frame properly so it doesn't
| need to be shoved or lifted up or yanked in order to be opened
| is easier than. But the real world is messy and sloppy and you
| gotta jiggle the key in just the right way in order to get it
| to work.
|
| Closing the door (assuming the robots weren't raised in a robot
| barn) is also harder than it looks if the door is shitty and
| needs a proper slam in order to be fully closed. Also, the
| robot locking the door behind itself after it comes in.
| Scanning a key card and opening a door, but the first try
| fails.
|
| We're a long way from a general robot that can screw a simple
| screw together like you would to assemble Ikea furniture.
|
| Object recognition.
|
| Gather only the dishes from a messy coffee table and put them
| in the dish bin.
|
| Pick up only the clothes from a messy floor and bed, and put
| them in the hamper.
|
| Dump a hamper of clothes onto a table, and sort out stuff that
| doesn't want to go into the washing machine.
|
| Terrain traversal.
|
| Just walk 500 ft, but theres increasing levels of obstacles in
| the way.
|
| We all saw Boston dynamics robot parkour videos, but what I
| want to see is a robot make it from the front door of Simpsons
| house to the kitchen in the back, but it's got to go through
| the living room, but it's hella messy, with Maggie and Bart and
| Lisa's crap strewn all over, Homer's got some beer bottles,
| some empty, some full, all over the floor and on the table, and
| all the robot has to do is walk from one side of the room to
| the far side of the room without stepping on anything, or
| knocking anything over. (Simpsons merely being a home layout
| that's familiar to most people. Doesn't need to actually be
| them.)
|
| Ducking under a low ceiling. Climb over a barrier, of varying
| shapes and sizes.
|
| Other loocomotion. how much weight in its arms in front of it,
| holding a 5-lb briefcase with one hand while walking. Can it
| carry something on its back? What's the limit? Can it give
| piggyback rides?
|
| A category for simulated. Let companies show off their robot's
| kinematics control systems, so have something on the level of
| CoppeliaSim, so the motors and the gears and the actuators are
| themselves simulated, vs a simple 3d video game where they are
| not. Plug their model into the simulated robot and see how well
| it just walks. If we remember QWOP, it's harder than it looks!
|
| Obviously it's not going to be totally 100% accurate to the
| real world. The benefit of this is it lets people complete from
| all over world without having to replicate a very specific
| setup in the physical world, and compete from wherever they
| live am not have to fly to your facility to test, opening up a
| whole new world of contestants because they can now compete
| because they can afford it now.
|
| At the end of the day, the most important challenge is, can it
| pick up a battery from the shelf, swap it with one of the two
| in its chassis, and put the dead one it just pulled out onto
| the charger?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Making a bed.
|
| You need to manipulate a large sheet, and you probably need to
| move around, bend down and lean over to reach all the corners.
| Bonus points for neat hospital corners on a flat sheet.
|
| Putting pillows in pillowcases is another fun one. Usually
| pretty easy, probably a bronze medal.
|
| Gold medal: put a UK super king size duvet inside a duvet
| cover. It's huge and awkward, there are buttons, and it's
| almost but not quite square (why??) so there's a good chance
| you'll get it round the wrong way and have to rotate it 90
| degrees.
| muvlon wrote:
| Something I still struggle with as a human: Cracking an egg
| into a bowl. No making a mess and no egg shell in the bowl.
|
| Gold Medal: Separate the egg white from the yolk!
| tintor wrote:
| replacing an inner tube on bicycle wheel - strong forces / both
| arms / level use / dexterity / problem solving
| robobenjie wrote:
| This one is really hard for me...
| dmillard wrote:
| Interesting post and great reference to [1] about why laundry
| hits a sweet spot of capability.
|
| Interestingly the repeated critiques in the article are about
| sensor richness: primarily force feedback and tactility, which
| indicates lacking hardware. Software only robotics has a long and
| fraught history, but it really feels to me that current
| industrial hardware could be driven more intelligently without
| much change. No doubt the "ideal" robot for any given task
| requires developments in both.
|
| I'm also curious about safety, since generally capable mechanisms
| need a multilayered safety stack that includes semantics, and
| cobot certification is likely not enough anymore. Examples:
| feeding someone the wrong pill, pouring a glass of water into
| electronics, cutting vegetables vs fingers.
|
| [1]
| https://substack.com/redirect/82d94852-76b6-4b0d-8595-86e46a...
| HarshP123 wrote:
| This is amazing!!
| jerrybmarchant wrote:
| What are your thoughts on this? Where do we stand?
|
| https://substack.com/@isitpropaganda/note/c-167073531?utm_so...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Rather than teaching your robot to fold inside-out clothes, you
| should teach it to attack people who put their clothes in the
| hamper inside out.
| arscan wrote:
| I think my shirts just automatically get inside-outted in my
| washer/dryer? I certainly don't put them in that way, and it
| seems like I spend a lot of righting them when putting away
| laundry.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Try putting some in inside-out and seeing if they get turned
| outside-out.
|
| I'm also curious which device does it!
|
| We should work this out, and also we will need a lot of
| robots to go after the manufacturer.
| blauditore wrote:
| I agree, but in some cases it makes sense to protect the print.
| Although I habe no idea if it actually helps.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If it's vinyl applied with heat (numbers on a jersey as an
| example), they recommend turning inside out. That way, if it
| gets too hot in the dryer, it only sticks to itself instead
| of to other garments. Losing the one garment is better than
| multiple.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've seen suggestions that having your clothes inside out in
| the wash helps them get cleaner. And if it keeps the AIs under
| control, you know, benefits.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Clothe instruction care sometimes requires washing clothes
| inside out.
| bnjmn wrote:
| Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the
| parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently
| restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its diaper,
| with everything that entails: identifying and eliminating all
| traces of waste from all crevices, applying diaper cream as
| necessary, unfolding and positioning the new diaper correctly and
| quickly, always using enough but never too much force... not to
| mention the nightmare of providing any guarantees about safety at
| mass-market scale. Even one maimed baby, or even just a baby some
| robot neglects to prevent from falling off the changing table, is
| game over for that line of robots.
|
| Is there any research program that could claim to tackle this?
| It's so far beyond folding laundry and doing dishes, which are
| already quite difficult.
|
| I wouldn't bet my life on this tech _never_ materializing, but I
| would mistrust anyone who claimed it was feasible with today's
| tech. It calls for an entirely different kind of robotic
| perception, feedback, and control.
| robobenjie wrote:
| This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're
| probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if
| you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course,
| your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think
| 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the
| bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a
| video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that
| I'd risk an infant in its grippers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero.
|
| Um, no it's not. Is absolutely zero tolerance. There is not
| weasel words out of this. If a robot was to cause any pain to
| the baby, there would be no remorse. There would be no front
| of mind thoughts to not repeat the same thing the next time.
| There would be no guilt for causing pain to the baby.
|
| Why you would "basically" this the way you have is
| disturbing.
| poly2it wrote:
| I don't think the parent comment advocates for hurting
| babies. It just, probably correctly, states that cherry
| picked examples won't be representative of roboty safety
| with infants in the next years, but that true safety will
| improve over time as well.
| robobenjie wrote:
| Sorry, this is me communicating like an engineer. In a
| technical sense risk of anything can only approach zero:
| never actually get there. I meant that there should be
| essentially zero chance, similar to holding a baby in your
| arms or putting it in a high chair, and probably less
| chance of injury than driving in a car with a baby in a
| car-seat. Basically zero.
| trhway wrote:
| real world treatment of babies is very different from the
| zero tolerance you've described. From pregnant mothers
| smoking/drinking to medical care unavailability to doctor
| errors to various toxin contaminated baby products and the
| environment (Flint leaded water comes to mind) to babies
| left in hot cars and other abuse to poor availability of
| daycare (even less availability of daycare good for mental
| development) to ...
|
| Granted most of this is unintentional. The same about
| injuries by robots - we're supposedly talking about
| unintentional injuries here. So, if robots save
| money/time/effort (like Flint water switch) i'm not sure
| that the society would suddenly change its current approach
| to unintentional baby injuries and implement zero
| tolerance.
|
| To illustrate - Uber self-driving killed a woman, and
| another self-driving maimed a woman in SF. Uber case was an
| obvious criminal gross negligence running with explicitly
| disabled emergency braking), and the company wiggled out of
| it in part by having to shut down the self-driving. Where
| is in SF it was an obvious case of technology limitations
| and teething issue, so there were no real severe
| consequences as we're much more tolerant to honest
| technological accidents (at least when they happen not to
| us personally).
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in
| 1-3 years
|
| This is _wildly_ optimistic. I quit working in robotics
| because I got tired of all the bullshit promises everybody
| made all the time. I 'm not saying robotics isn't advancing
| or the work is unimportant, but the spokespeople are about as
| reliable as Musk when it comes to timelines.
|
| I doubt it will happen in 10 years, even with a constrained
| environment and hardware that costs well into 6 digits.
| amarant wrote:
| I think GP was basically talking about doing it on a doll.
| As in, a robot in 1-3 years might be able to change diapers
| with occasional success, but half the tries will result in
| a dismembered diaper user: we'd use dolls in this scenario,
| since dismembering babies is taboo and generally frowned
| upon within the robotics community.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > It would require an entirely different kind of robotics.
|
| I was 100% with you until suddenly this technical claim pops
| out. You might feel this way, and might be right, but _why_?
| Changing a diaper is crazy hard, I absolutely agree, but you
| seem to be just declaring from vibes that we 'require an
| entirely different kind of robotics'. Can you put your finger
| on why this is true?
|
| Not nitpicking for the fun of it - I'm genuinely interested.
| Robot person.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Well, Mr Robot person, would you let today's robotics change
| your clothes right now? If you wouldn't, then why would you
| allow it any where near a baby? If you would, why? What robot
| with what tech would you allow?
| nerdsniper wrote:
| The main limitation right now is that robotics are very
| limited in their sense of touch.
|
| After that, they are limited in their understanding of
| physics. After that, perhaps understanding of physics and
| physiology would come into play - but perhaps superhuman
| perception and reaction time could reduce the need for
| intuitive understanding physics and physiology.
| shubb wrote:
| I think it needs a water gun. If the diaper was a spray on
| layered rubber, like a sponge then an impermeable layer, and
| then you sprayed a solvent to clear the old diaper and poop
| and then spray on a new one. You'd just need to slot them
| into styrups briefly or some socks on strings to move the
| legs into a good position.
|
| But can this be done with baby skin and lung safe chemicals
| at a reasonable temperature?
|
| Point being humanoid designs for robots that manipulate
| objects designed for humans are an artificially hard problem
| we have decided to fail at solving.
| Retric wrote:
| Zero failure rates are a very different bar. Software must be
| treated as actively malicious from a hardware standpoint. So
| it comes down to designing hardware capable of the task
| that's also incapable of causing harm.
|
| Meanwhile it must also be strong enough to move and restrain
| a range of infants which is a level of force capable of harm
| without any possibility to fail deadly. Nuclear power plants
| are an incredibly simple problem by comparison yet zero
| possibility of harm isn't the standard because it's so
| unrealistic.
| trhway wrote:
| > a baby some robot neglects to prevent from falling off the
| changing table
|
| that is when we think about 2 handed robots. 6 handed robot can
| easily have 2-3 hands assigned to tightly keeping the baby.
| Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans
| which is really an artificial constraint. After all we aren't
| building airplanes using birds as the blueprint.
|
| On the similar note - while not about baby, was just rewatching
| an early Bing Bang Theory season with this episode where Howard
| "falls right into the mechanical hand"
| fgbarben wrote:
| won't the baby feel dis-abled by only having two arms?
| trhway wrote:
| On the other hand - the baby will from the beginning
| develop an instinct to keep track of 6 hands flying around
| instead of just 2. Will help in future street fights :)
|
| In general, looking at the AI coding agents i think we all
| either already feel or soon will feel disabled. And
| honestly i think human race with its perception of itself
| as the "top of the Creation" is due for a modesty lesson to
| help speed up the evolution. We're spending tremendous
| resources unproductively, be it wars or just ineffective
| economies, etc. We don't feel the urge to develop our
| civilization and to evolve ourselves in all aspects - from
| mental and biological to cyber-integration. The Mother
| Nature doesn't like such relaxed species.
| Onavo wrote:
| Why? There's nothing particularly special about this problem. I
| would bet a year for an alpha version, and production version
| in 5 years. We are not exactly limited by mechanical
| engineering here, there's nothing particularly unique about the
| human hand that can't be replicated. Tele operated surgical
| robotics have been a thing for decades. Give it a few months
| for the multimodal robotic VLM/LAMs to catch up. In many ways
| this particular problem is a lot more well defined than e.g.
| self driving cars.
| tintor wrote:
| > there's nothing particularly unique about the human hand
| that can't be replicated
|
| Humanity is far from replicating / matching performance of
| human hand.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't see why that would be so hard. This is potentially
| easier than reliably shooting guns at people.
|
| That machine will look like a bean bag couch in rough shape of
| a giant human hand, with few of cooperative work robotic arms.
| The couch part hugs and secures all limbs of the baby to into
| the party escort submission position, then the cobots move in
| to find the disassembly markers on the diaper to tear it open
| to remove it. Then a showerhead, then a hair dryer, then baby
| powder sprayer can be brought out and ran to clean any residues
| and take care of rashes. Finally, the new diaper can be brought
| in, baby wrapped, and the double sided tapes on it lightly
| pressed on to secure it.
|
| The entire machine would probably cost less than 10 million USD
| per unit if mass produced at reasonable scales, and most
| technological elements needed in such machines would be readily
| available.
| XCSme wrote:
| I don't know, for me it looks like the demo robot already does it
| quite well.
| byearthithatius wrote:
| Think about how fast progress is being made now. When I was a kid
| in the early 2000s we would see some basic robot progress on
| movements (almost always from Boston Dynamics or sometimes China)
| and we thought it was incredible. Robot dogs running was amazing
| and five or so years later a backflip blew our minds. Those
| robots were specially designed and didn't look humanoid. Now we
| have bi-pedal humanoid robots and they walk and move fairly
| capably - even able to get up after falls. Now within the last
| year I have seen them learn Kung Fu, become really fast at
| getting up, become resistant to being knocked down by quite a lot
| of force, and now even doing tasks like those shown here.
|
| Just imagine 2050 if the progress continues at this rate. I am
| both excited and really scared.
| hatthew wrote:
| Almost all progress at doing tasks _reliably_ has been made
| with 2 massive caveats:
|
| 1. Force. Walking, running, fighting, doing backflips, etc. all
| allow for large amounts of force, without a lot of _dynamic_
| precision required. Many common tasks require precise and
| dynamic force. E.g. for washing a window, pushing too hard
| breaks the glass while pushing too softly will leave streaks.
|
| 2. Environment interaction. Most reliable humanoid robots do
| minimal environment interaction beyond self-balancing. They
| walk/run/jump in environments that are largely open, with
| usually convex blocky obstacles. The real world has lots of
| tasks that require processing beyond low-resolution maps of
| solid/open space. E.g. I'd want to see a robot that can walk
| through a forest: jumping/stepping over thin branches that are
| hard to see, ducking under fallen logs, pushing though bendy
| branches without breaking them, avoiding ground that is muddy,
| and seeing through the current obstacle to determine if the
| obstacle beyond is traversable.
|
| Just to reiterate, I don't see fast progress being made on
| doing these tasks _reliably_. It 's easy to show 1/N success
| rate, and much much harder to show ~N/N success rate on these
| dynamic tasks.
| poly2it wrote:
| Great post! Now somebody with the connections just needs to make
| it happen. For event five, slippery when wet, you should
| definitely include drying your hands on a towel, as it serves an
| important hygienic function.
| ubj wrote:
| Platinum Medal: Complete a gold medal task in the presence of
| multiple children between the ages of 3 and 8. The children must
| remain safe throughout (and after) the entire process.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Can I say something: could you all please stop inserting
| contaminated tool back into a jar of food? You use a clean tool
| to take out the amount you eat, and that's it.
|
| You can put it back if the tool had touched nothing but: air, the
| food in the jar, and your hand at the operating end. Otherwise,
| that butter knife stays on your dish for the rest of the meal.
| The exception would be if you cleaned the tool, like bare minimum
| by wiping with a brand new piece of tissue paper(but that's kind
| of wasteful).
|
| Is that an outrageous ask? I know it's probably not a huge deal,
| like free water and such, and my techniques are that of total
| amateur being never professionally involved in medical and/or bio
| science fields, but just, how can you stand possible breadcrumbs
| IN THE JAR!?
| benjiro wrote:
| > but just, how can you stand possible breadcrumbs IN THE JAR!?
|
| Bacteria can do a number on people... Kept telling the wife to
| not cross contaminate jars, and other products. But you know,
| she knows better...
|
| Wife was eating some fish in can, puts spoon back (with lovely
| saliva bacteria), puts in fridge "i wil eat tomorrow", 2 days
| later she eats the leftover.
|
| She enjoyed a hour+ of "fun" muscles contracting stomach cramps
| to the point it was almost hospital time. Learned her lesson,
| well, ... for fish.
|
| Its always like "but i do not like to keep using fresh
| utensils". I am always: "the dishwasher does not care if it 20
| or 40 utensils". Its the same amount of wash and cost. So stop
| trying to recycle utensils!
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