This page has a rather grand title, but will just deal with my opinions about the current focuses on robotics trends. I think humanoid robotics is flashy, but might not be the best approach. A lot of time is being spent on walking and balancing robots, but what is that actually useful for? There’s a lack of imagination in form and hardware design here.
Robots break down into a few things
- robots meant for a specific purpose and meant to do that purpose as reliably, repeatably, and rapidly as possible
- robots meant for general purpose tasks and meant to be exposed to many different environments and conditions/tasks
The pareto frontier for robots feels somewhat tight - this is where we differ from llms in general. Getting more general does not make us better at specific tasks.
I think there needs to be some sort of state transition in robotics for us to reach a point where generalizing makes us better at specific tasks. We haven’t had our “chatgpt moment” yet.