It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor.
What remains unautomated, then?
The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditional robots.
This is where this new generation of robotics comes in. This is the kind of task they're designed to do: "a task that's still done by a human in a high automation environment". Universal robots are angling for the tasks that are impossible or uneconomical to automate with traditional industrial robots.
Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/fixed gantry. Wheeled mobile manipulators are only needed in a few cases, and humanoid form-factor is only "necessary" in very few cases (and I don't think the current crop of humanoids is particularly suited to these tasks).
In my opinion/experience, the impediments are that (1) the system integrators that are usually responsible for assembly-line robotics are too stupid to figure out how to apply robots to the problem, (2) the automakers themselves are often too short-sighted/stupid/unwilling to invest in increased automation (and particularly in building the in-house competency that they really need), (3) the hostile/exploitative relationship between (most) automakers and their main suppliers means that low-hanging improvements to parts/assemblies are a non-starter, and (4) the automaker C-suite (and investors) are too drawn to silver-bullet solutions (e.g. humanoids) than practical automation improvements.
Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way.
At a certain point, the tasks that remain stop being "dexterity" problems and start being "AI" problems. That is: a robot could do the task - if you either spent big $$$ on redesigning the entire task around the robot's intellectual limitations (uneconomical), or if you had an incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving driving that robot (impossible with 00s AI).
The "universal robot" bet is the "incredibly advanced AI capable of problem solving" bet. That in 2020s, AI is finally capable. The body only has to be "good enough to make most tasks possible".
An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind.
I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
The only thing I can think of are tasks that are so rarely done, it's not economical to build a robot for. But I then I also don't see how another robot solves this problem.
B) there’s a long tail of individual tasks it’s uneconomical to build purpose-built robots for each individual task. But it’s economical to have 1 robot that can do all of them.
One can lift insane weights, has insane torque, and absurd precision, and can do the same movement millions of times with virtually no deviation. You program these with an exact movement plan, just like you would programm a CnC with a tool path. They are basically cnc machines.
The other one is a inacurate, unstable, dynamic system controlled by neural networks and heuristics. It has massive deviation over each run, but that means that the programming must be able to account for it. Which makes it suitable to operate on problems that are messy, unrepeatable and human-shaped.
All you need to do is look at a recent video of car manufacturing process, and watch what the humans are doing.
Better than what? It seems that as long as they perform the tasks "better" (cheaper / faster / lower-error) than the humans that are currently performing them, that is an improvement for the factory owner.
>What remains unautomated, then?
Stuff that can be done by purpose specific robot arms on wheeled platforms, which is very difficult, but will be much more feasible than a humanoid robot doing anything.
You can't put a robot arm on a wheeled platform without making the platform very heavy otherwise the whole thing will topple over. This gives your entire assembly a mandatory floor space requirement that may be quite large, and severely constrains how much reach you have (see the Handle robot from BD itself).
A platform like the Segway with a self-balancing system can help with this, but since it doesn't have legs it has very little ability to keep the top of the platform steady - all it can do is accelerate around to try and accommodate wobbles, whereas a bipedal robot can simply shuffle it's legs around and keep the top of it's body stable.
It is difficult to build a control system which can do this, but once it's done it's done.
Lots of things that don't require legs.
Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.
This strike me more as a repeated internet myth more than anything else. There is near endless opportunity for purpose-specific robot forms.
Or a new take on car design with automated production in mind regarding all the wiring and what not (easier said than done, I'm sure many have tried and failed, but eventually someone will succeed).
Even if I think this has legs, where do the cheap humans go to work after? Where/what are the remaining jobs for all of this displaced labour in both white collar and blue collar worlds? It basically screams UBI. And in a UBI world, the economy looks pretty different and humanoid esque robots start to look either very altruistic or very dystopian depending on how hard the oligarchs don't want things to change.
Like, what's the end game for humans in this path we're embarking?
The market becomes more efficient as fewer human beings are needed to create value and move capital. A lot of them are going to die, surplus to requirements. A lot more will be stuck in lives of grinding and meager poverty, probably doing gig work acting as "flesh AI" for less expensive robots or "blood boys" for the rich. But the rich will be very rich indeed.
It won't just be end-stage capitalism killing people, either. The collapse of the knowledge economy, scientific and research institutions and the mass adoption of AI to fill the gap will kill tons of people too, as will the return of diseases like polio and smallpox, and mass starvation as climate change destroys global agriculture, and the normalization of christofascism.
We're almost certainly not getting UBI, at least not in the US. It would help too many black people and immigrants, half the country would secede. We might get something called UBI but only so long as it isn't universal, and has tons of racially biased and religiously motivated means testing and plenty of carve-outs that keep that money flowing to the top, and out of the hand of the "useless eaters."
And the tasks that change from day to day.
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...
Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.
Dishes, laundry, house cleaning, cooking, food prep, organization, lawn work, car repair, home repair, etc etc etc. Expecting purpose built robots for every single task seems ridiculous.
There's half a dozen techno-creationists in this HN submission.
Something these techno-creationists are silent about is the fact that "for human designed" environments require the full intelligence of a human and not just have the limbs of a human. The reason for that is that most of these environments are hardly designed at all and instead rely intensively on extreme levels of human adaptation.
It's like self driving cars. The extreme tail end of things a driver must do is endless. You will have to draw a line somewhere that designates the limits of the robots and the moment you do, you will have to design environments for humanoid robots instead of humans.
The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.
For example, having 3 arms would help a lot of tasks. Or having fingers with twice the length of human fingers and 4 joints on each finger could enable them to switch a headlight bulb on a French car.
Hands are just hard: no one is building good hands yet because the materials science and motors isn't there to do it (see the production Atlas's with the 3 finger grippers).
And of course training data: we have a wealth of examples of how to move a bipedal platform around, but there are no 4-armed humans so you'd be figuring out the balancing from scratch (but it also has the same problem: 4 arms in physics terms is still basically 2: if you lose your balance you'll need to involve both arms to correct it).
Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?
https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+robonaut+video+hand+why...
The gist of it is that all tools on the spacecraft (eg: space-drill, space-coffee-maker, space-airlock) are all designed to fit a gloved human astronaut hand. Waaaaay more complicated to make a robo-hand than a robo-suction cup or robo-claw, but then you are matching the environment, and guarantee tool compatibility against all extant tasks!
We already have specialized robots on earth... paper slicer, lawn mower, bazooka, whatever. They're all machines that are specialized for the task at hand, we're not making a humanoid robot that gets down on all fours and individually plucks blades of glass.
The car factories already have specialized robots... they're not mimicking a human hand holding a can of spray paint, shaking it up, and painting the car that way... it's a 6-axis arm, or a whole "grab the car and flip it while spraying paint" system.
It's not about inventing purpose-specific robots, it's about handling that long-tail of "stuff with tools that a human is designed to be able to use." Go over there, push that button. Go move that box from table1 to table2. Etc.
For well defined tasks in the factory domain, make a "real robot". For ad-hoc tasks in the interim... strap an LLM to a camera, battery, robo-legs and arms, cross your fingers, and hope for the best?
They would be. When everything what could be done would be done by a robot. 24/7. Even without the lights on the floor.
You're not seeing "cheaper": you're seeing a literal arms race.
the human frame is just an experimental proxy for functionality, which turned out to be promising
two arms alone is the purpose-built robot you're referencing
I've never been to a factory but I bet there's a lot of the same bullshit. Ditto in a mine.
On the other hand, I've been in a datacentre. I don't see much need for a humanoid form in there, everything is flat and predictable. Why don't we have robot DC techs? This is probably an interesting clue re the next 10 years of robotics and maybe the reason Boston Dynamics is only valued at $1.1B.
Seems we might still be pretty limited on usecases. Maybe a dexterity bottleneck.
What are you talking about?
Go outside, look around! The whole word was created by and for humans.
SoftBank has now exercised that option.
That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.
Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.
Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.
Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.
The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.
You wouldn't but apparently your employer would.
I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me.
That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).
Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, and they are still miles away from being useful in your average home (they only "fold" if pieces are handed to them one-by-one, or the more advanced ones that can pick out clothes from a pile look like they were folded by a 3 year old).
Also, consider that all-in-one washer/dryer combos have existed for a while, but they are still a teeny percentage of washer sales because they're expensive and require more maintenance. There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
I know there's tons of activity on humanoid teleoperation data collection, and motion model training, but it hasn't seemed to bear out much of anything.
Like.... AI would be great if I could put it into a magical semi-corporeal familiar but I'm just not seeing a path to those either.
Cars will be able to safely drive themselves autonomously well before there is a humanoid robot capable of safely driving non-autonomous cars.
Agreed. Boston Dynamics’ focus has always been more on industrial uses, though, and while they’re getting to the point where eg. Atlas might be useful in a factory environment, they’re still a ‘premium’ supplier.
Seeing some of the stuff coming from Unitree and other competitors, SoftBank might be wondering if BD can stay in the game.
The only way I could see these AI robots take off is if on top of all those things, it could also perform sexual favors and develop personalities for people to bond with. Robosexuals would buy these primarily for those features and then household duties as nice plausible deniability.
Seems like the only companies VCs want to fund now are robotics, energy, and chips. That "software AI" has had its run.
Being less cynical, I do think it’s fair to say that they just didn’t quite find PMF; they aren’t good enough for factory work, Spot is niche, and Atlas is too scary for in-home.
The robot butler business model just hasn’t been tested in the same way AFAIK.
1) https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1u7aiwg/oc...
2) https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1hro33r/global...
Regardless, Boston Dynamics has been burning cash for 35 years and all they have to show for it are some fancy demos and trial deployments. Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.
If they had paid $60 billion dollars in cash for Cursor, it would have been a ripoff.
The average (and above-average?) investor really does not understand tech.
Hey, Hyundai isn't "just a car company"
This is a good hint that robots are really about to take off.
Humanoid robots loaded with an AI agent, on the other hand, could actually make you a sudo sandwich, do your laundry, or help you with that weekend project in the backyard. They're finally about to get useful.
I'm not a fan of humanoid robots personally (they creep me out), but I'd love to have a functional R2-D2 with me.
This is the same thing about spacex buying cursor
That news was also published twice!
All those tokens have to go somewhere
Who cares about quality. Speed is the new black.
While Atlas is the best humanoid robot so far, it still isn't useful in a car factory that's fully equipped with the latest factory robots that are strong enough to juggle car engines and are bolted to the floor.
Everyone knows the killer app for humanoid robots is building the Mars colony amirte?
Sort of "join the army see the world" kind of stuff.
The reality is however, pushing a parts cart to the other side of the factory, returning and doing it again. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, with time-off to recharge or possibly re-oil.
I sincerely hope they're not sentient and unable to communicate it. It would certainly account for the blank stare coming from behind the tinted lenses.
the other timing here is the increasingly belligerent union who are demanding pretty outrageous compensation for what a typical American worker would make. I think the goal is to immediately automate the workforce and move the plants out of korea speaking to insiders.
I do think this might be tied to South Korea's demographics, by 2040 the working-age population is projected to decline 25% from 2020 and keep declining almost linearly until leveling out around 17M around 2065, a 50% drop total in < 50 years. I would think HMG / Hyundai sees a huge business opportunity or this might be a national-level political priority but I don't know the specifics.
The upkeep cost is going to be astronomical for a very long time.
The human body gets beat up doing physical work but can self heal. The robot can not.
Accidents happen all the time doing work and the robot is not going to be as accurate as a human.
I would assume there are zero robot mechanics in the town I live.
I think we will just look back at this time as the good ol days during the peak of the bubble when buying a humanoid robot seemed like something on the horizon.
I imagine 5 years from now it will feel much further away than it does right now.
Chinese companies were quick to jump in and fill that unfulfilled demand. I work with robots and have never seen a Boston machine irl. Tonnes of Chinese though
Huh?
I mean...what evidence does the management at Hyundai have that shows them that these things aren't just YouTube stars? What teams does it have in place to start the transition from not profitable?
The new Qwen robotics suite is impressive.
Rest is previously reported stuff.
Related from earlier in the year:
Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46520508
And old discussions when the intial buy happened:
2020: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981
2021: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
Hyundai (the chaebol) has no such policy. They sell their heavy equipment to oppressive regimes to blatantly use in projects and efforts deemed illegal under international humanitarian law and by the International Court of Justice.
Progress in robotics has been impressive, but is there any evidence that we are approaching this point? How many days are needed to teach a robot a task at even 90% reliability? Given that most companies are still only showing of demos, that number looks to be way more than 2...
However, let's hope they will keep on doing cool stuff under their new owner.
