An Electric New Era for Atlas

Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by robinhoode on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @03:22PM (#40069034)

It's a hypothetical deployment but it's reasonable to expect. These robots will be very valuable, and everyone will want one. It's not going to become a housemaid in a few years. But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. Moravec's paradox is still in play, but advancement in AI chips will slowly overcome it.

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by Intralexical on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @04:50PM (#40069926)

> But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.

What can humanoid robots making car parts do, that the already-existing and already widely deployed robots making car parts can't?

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by wepple on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @06:00PM (#40070513)

Re-tool an entire factory overnight in response to a change in design of the car, or in fact to produce airplanes instead

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by ok_dad on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @06:21PM (#40070671)

I don’t think you understand how hard it is to retool and rearrange a factory.

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by wepple on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @06:45PM (#40070882)

I’m saying if you have a collection of humanoids and general purpose tooling, you can adapt much faster.

I don’t literally mean retool a conventional production line in one night

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by ok_dad on Thursday April 18, 2024 @01:10AM (#40073165)

So basically just robots with tools? It might work.

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by ben_w on Thursday April 18, 2024 @01:55AM (#40073368)

Without knowing the specifics, that would be whichever things prevented Tesla from being run as a lights-out factory already.

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by umeshunni on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @07:16PM (#40071120)

> But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.

Worth calling out that Hyundai is a major investor in Boston Dynamics.

FTA: This journey will start with Hyundai—in addition to investing in us, the Hyundai team is building the next generation of automotive manufacturing capabilities, and it will serve as a perfect testing ground for new Atlas applications.

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by delfinom on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @07:25PM (#40071191)

They own 80% of BD. Softbank owns the remaining 20%

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by throwaway2037 on Thursday April 18, 2024 @07:40AM (#40075108)

Wiki says it is 100% owned by Hyandai.

    > Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Group since December 2020, but having only completed the acquisition in June 2021.

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Re:An Electric New Era for Atlas by joe_the_user on Thursday April 18, 2024 @05:05PM (#40080716)

But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly.

I believe robots are currently making car parts in abundance. The robots usually are like a box with a hydraulic arm or something equivalent.

The specially and especially hard part of humanoid robots is justifying the cost and complexity of the construction by having them by "walk-on replacements" for humans and so they have failed entirely at being that.

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