Famed roboticist says humanoid robot bubble is doomed to burst

In Brief

Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up telephone for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: you’re wasting your money.

Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades astatine MIT, is peculiarly skeptical of companies similar Tesla and Figure trying to thatch robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. In a caller essay, helium calls this attack “pure phantasy thinking.”

The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with astir 17,000 specialized interaction receptors that nary robot comes adjacent to matching. While instrumentality learning transformed code designation and representation processing, those breakthroughs built connected decades of existing exertion for capturing the close data. “We don’t person specified a contented for interaction data,” Brooks points out.

Then there’s safety. Full-sized walking humanoid robots pump monolithic amounts of vigor into staying upright. When they fall, they’re dangerous. Physics means a robot doubly the size of today’s models would battalion 8 times the harmful energy.

Brooks predicts that successful 15 years, palmy “humanoid” robots volition really person wheels, aggregate arms, and specialized sensors and wantonness the quality form. Meanwhile, he’s thoroughly convinced that today’s billions are backing costly grooming experiments that volition ne'er standard to wide production.

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