I work in robotics, and yes we still do a lot of positional programming although that is starting to change. A couple of outstanding issues exist. (1) Robotics is expensive. Even Chinese manufacturers tend to price robotics grade motors at $500 a piece. (2) Iteration time is long. Our simulation environments are hard to use (poor integration with CAD) and slow (this is changing). Theres also a gap between simulation and reality (which is growing smaller, but still not small enough for everyday use) (3) People's expectations are unrealistic. Its easy to program a robot that can move in a flat non-crowded environment. Its still out of our grasp to be able to get robots to move in a crowded dynamic environment. Similarly, its easy to grasp certain types of objects but handling dynamics of other objects is much harder. (4) A lot of academia tends to focus on rewards, competitions, buzzwords (Deep Learning and RL) and smaller problems that can get them publications. Yet there is little interest in real world problems. There are exceptions to this, but the norm is professors will select low risk projects which use deeplearning to solve a very narrow constrained problem.

What is the difference between standard motors and robotics grade motors?

I would imagine robots like very high torque low speed motors with no backlash. Built in high precision position sensing is also probably nice.

It's application dependent.

If you're making a robot fitting car doors, you want precision and high torque - but you also want high enough speed to keep your cycle times down.

And of course you'll want a magnetic brake that can stop your heaviest payload at top speed, in case there's a power cut or the control software crashes.

But you don't engage the brakes every time you're stationary. So the robot can stay in one place, you'll need enough cooling that you can apply full torque with a stationary motor indefinitely without any heat worries.

And if your robot is industrial? No air holes or fans for you. Gotta find that cooling entirely passively.

Oh, and if it wears out after 2 years of 24/7 operation your users will consider that unreliable. They'll do scheduled maintenance - but they'll still be running robots from the floppy disk era.

Yep and they will be brushless motors which means a controller that costs at least $85 per axis (though a $500 motor may have that integrated already).

What is the problem with cheaper motors? Would a sufficiently smart controller work with a cheaper motor?

Yes, in some low torque, high speed applications, we could design motor controllers that are smarter even for DC brushed motors. Its probably even possible to do force control on them. But these motors will wear out VERY quickly, in the end you will spend more on replacing the motors than if you had started out with a brushless, high precision, lo w backlash, high torque motor. Furthermore, if you need a decent amount of torque most cheap motors can't handle them.

> Amazon had a competition for bin-picking robots, but never got anything that could replace a few hundred thousand pickers in their fulfillment centers. There's a demand for this, but still few usable products.

There's a few spin-off companies [0][1] and probably others from that competition. It's coming, but slowly. Humans are simply too good at manipulation and robots too expensive in comparison.

[0] https://fizyr.com/ [1] https://lyro.io/

Wouldn’t a robot with the adaptability and trainablility of a human be, in effect a human? I say this only partially in jest. At one time I drove an old jalopy that developed a broken throttle cable, being poor i contrived a fix by splicing the two ends together with a nut and bolt. I joke to a friend the operation required three hands, one to hold the cable together, one to hold the bolt and one to turn the nut. I often reflect on what would be required to “program” a machine to perform such an operation; under the dash where the steering column transited the floor board, no less.

Of course robots aren’t expected to do such tasks, that’s just an example of a complex task that seems impossible to implement. And there are an infinite number of such tasks in the human repertoire.

> Amazon had a competition for bin-picking robots, but never got anything that could replace a few hundred thousand pickers in their fulfillment centers. There's a demand for this, but still few usable products.

I was going to say “what did they end up doing with Kiva?”, but the latest marketing [1] suggests “picking is hard, so we use the robots to carry stuff from A => B on a grid”.

What’s your sense on assembly robots at the high end? (E.g., for cars).

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/new-robots-new-j...

Amazon will use bin pickers when minimum wages and collective bargaining hits a deep enough nerve