Pizza-making seems to be a very popular target for robotics startups, which is weird because we've had successful industrial-scale pizza robots for decades. In this case it seems like the...
Pizza-making seems to be a very popular target for robotics startups, which is weird because we've had successful industrial-scale pizza robots for decades. In this case it seems like the researchers are just using pizza as a representative difficult human task to develop a more general purpose algorithm, but I still want to mention: when you're designing a robot to accomplish a particular task, asking "how does a human do it" is almost always the wrong question. Here's a modern pizza robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsuxMC3ObTE. Having seen that, now watch this incredibly embarrassing video from Zume Pizza, a startup that had raised $6 million at the time this was filmed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFSdxwRVh8A. A year later they raised $48 million more before realizing this is a stupid idea, then pivoting, raising several hundred million more, buying a company called Pivot, and pivoting again.
Think about your dishwasher, a 100-year-old domestic robot. It uses less water and soap than you, takes up less space, makes less noise, etc. If we instead tried to design a humanoid dishwashing robot, it would lose all these advantages and gain an enormous amount of complexity.
Pizza-making seems to be a very popular target for robotics startups, which is weird because we've had successful industrial-scale pizza robots for decades. In this case it seems like the researchers are just using pizza as a representative difficult human task to develop a more general purpose algorithm, but I still want to mention: when you're designing a robot to accomplish a particular task, asking "how does a human do it" is almost always the wrong question. Here's a modern pizza robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsuxMC3ObTE. Having seen that, now watch this incredibly embarrassing video from Zume Pizza, a startup that had raised $6 million at the time this was filmed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFSdxwRVh8A. A year later they raised $48 million more before realizing this is a stupid idea, then pivoting, raising several hundred million more, buying a company called Pivot, and pivoting again.
Think about your dishwasher, a 100-year-old domestic robot. It uses less water and soap than you, takes up less space, makes less noise, etc. If we instead tried to design a humanoid dishwashing robot, it would lose all these advantages and gain an enormous amount of complexity.