I think a lot of this boils down to cost, too. Especially since you made the point about Boston Dynamics. We could look up the price for Spot (the dog) or the estimates what Atlas cost. The military or some bomb defusal unit are logical target audience. They’re happy to pay that kind of money and might have some good use for it. It’ll take some time until it’s worth the price for a cost-optimized warehouse which absolutely needs humanoid robots and can’t do it with the tech that automates warehouses for decades already. And the androids need to become much more affordable (aka mass-produced) to be bought by regular consumers. So yeah. We need to invent them in the first place. And I’m pretty sure adoption will take quite some time. Just because inventing something, and mass-producing it and making it affordable are two very different things.
(And I think currently we have neither. I saw a few videos about this year’s World Robot Conference in China… And the androids look great. But they’re all doing very limited tech-demos, if at all.)
Last time I looked, the dog started at $75,000? So Atlas is going to be roughly the same as a mortgage?
Yeah, seems right. And seems like I’m not up to date with the Altas models any more. Last time I checked that thing still had rollover bars, was made of aircraft-grade aluminum and titanium, and probably also cost a similar amount to build like a decent airplane… I don’t think they’re for sale, though. Those (Boston Dynamics) bipedal robots are prototypes for research.
Issue with all those robots is energy! The Spot dog lasts for 2,5 hours. That’s why it isn’t in military use. Same for the Humanoids. Once the battery challenge is solved we‘ll see Humanoids at battle fields first. My guess.
