Famous roboticist Rodney Brooks has awakening calls for investors who are pouring billions into humanoid robot startups. You’re wasting your money.
Brooks, who co-founded Irobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies such as Tesla and Tesla, who are trying to teach robot dexterity by showing human videos. In his new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking.”
problem? The human hands are incredibly refined, packed with around 17,000 special touch receptors, and the robots aren’t matched. While machine learning has changed the transformed speech recognition and image processing, these breakthroughs were built on decades of existing technology to capture the right data. “There is no such tradition for touch data,” Brooks points out.
Then there’s safety. Full-size walking humanoid robots allow huge amounts of energy to stand upright. When they fall, they are dangerous. Physics means that a robot twice the size of today’s models packs eight times the harmful energy.
Brooks predicts that in 15 years, “humanoid” robots will actually have wheels, multiple arms, special sensors and abandon their human form. Meanwhile, he is thoroughly convinced that today’s billions are funding expensive training experiments that will not expand to mass production.
