$6,500 for OpenArm v2. Incredibly smooth movement, 4kg of load per arm. Its unclear how far the level of autonomous control has come so far. The video shows mostly tele-operated operation. I have to agree with other comments here that folding laundry is the killer app.
In the movie Idiocracy they have a dispenser with fresh clothes to put on covered in advertising — assuming free. I’m surprised that doesn’t exist and perhaps made of recycled plastic?
One would expect it to at least have calibration and inverse kinematics solved. That's still a massive pain point for the SO-ARM101 despite it being so common now, since there's no base_link to gripper calibration nor sag compensation and every center offset stacks.
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.
I'm not super up to date on new releases, the one I'm most familiar with is X-VLA which predicts gripper poses and relative movement deltas for kinematics to move to instead of joints, and trains on forward kinematic gripper poses. I think Intern and Octo have the same approach.
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 laundry is an exemplary case of a lot of household work which involves carefully collecting items through the house, putting them into a machine to run a cleaning cycle, then putting them away in their right location.
folding is a hard middle step in the laundry process, but the job is end to end
It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)
To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.
People are consuming useless plastic toys at an unfathomable rate. It's one example, but it likely contributes so much more to the stress on our planet than actual robots capable of providing actual utility by a huge margin. I'll question the use of humanity's resources once we reel in behaviors like that a bit.
Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.
I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.
I genuinely don’t understand this binary thinking. You could easily turn it around: if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise.
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?
I just want my laundry folding robot to run slower than me, and not be able to do karate backflips etc in the event of some undesired scope creep happening one day.
Oh great now you’re outsourcing the “where the hell did the other sock go and why are there always odd numbers coming out of the dryer” existential crises to AI. Is there no aspect of the human experience you won’t cede to machines?
i'm not really sure if people are being sarcastic about laundry folding being the real application of this because I have never felt in my life that i want a robot folding my laundry. i actually love folding my laundry.
It's a huge milestone for robotic capabilities more generally. This particular problem has been discussed a ton in robotics communities. It requires a gentle-but-firm grip and extreme dexterity across a wide range of shapes, sizes, weights, densities and material types.
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.
>>> 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.
I see, is it like arc agi but for robots? wouldn't the companies just laundryfold-maxx their robots then?
That would mean maximizing robotic dexterity, not just control, which means improved hardware. Roboticists would be ecstatic with a laundry-maxxed robot.
My current opinion is that trying to 'maxx' in this area (as has been done with other benchmarks) would actually bring enough other use cases with it as a side effect that it would be worthwhile.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Haines
intimacy over onlyfans with a guy in india pretending to be the woman is the proper killer app.
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
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo
[2] https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0
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.
- "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
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?