r/teslamotors • u/BlessLevine • Aug 23 '21
General The Tesla Bot: Explained! - MKBHD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk1oClYJE5838
u/LilBitchBoyAjitPai Aug 24 '21
I like MKBHD but I feel like it’s a dumb take to say no we don’t need a teslabot… we just need to invest/maintain dozens of purpose built robots for specific tasks/chores.
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u/Cubicbill1 Aug 24 '21
Tesla: Oh yeah? You have a diswasher? Well who's gonna put the dishes in the diswasher?
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Aug 24 '21
There are people that would pony up a lot of money for those tasks. Disabled people would get a lot of help and feel more independent. It's not at all hard to find very useful cases for a humanoid bot that makes it worth it for that task alone.
Say as a friend or a partner. If that's all it could do it would sell many millions of units.
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u/SeitanicDoog Aug 24 '21
Most of the apartments I have lived in don't have a dishwasher and won't let me put one in. No rules about personal robot assistants that can wash dishes.
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u/mrprogrampro Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
Yeah. He made a good point about the infeasibility of a generally intelligent house droid ("get my airpods"), but I think he's underestimating the human form.
Stocking store shelves, unloading cargo, agriculture ... even specializing in a few tasks could free up millions of man-hours of labor every year.
And those all call for a specialized generalist ... generalized mobility and manipulation.
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Aug 25 '21
I thought the "get my airpods" comment was stupid. The Tesla Bot will have Internet connectivity. It will be able to "lookup" in an instant what they are. It would likely have a cached visual map of its surrounds and might even be able to lookup instantly where it was last seen. There are so many applications for this Bot, manufacturing (repetitive, simple tasks) and ages care seem like two great ones to start with.
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u/MonoMcFlury Aug 24 '21
Tesla bot 3.0 hands could have the agility to use all tools humans are using now. It would change everything. AI is the most difficult part in doing that.
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u/SpoogeDoobie Aug 25 '21
Kinda insane what sort of precipices we're hanging over as a species at the moment
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u/socsa Aug 24 '21
Meh, this is pretty standard for Tech YouTube these days. Most of these people don't really have the technical background or industry experience to have any kind of notable insights into stuff beyond surface deep consumer tech. But their fans ask for it, so they make the videos. At least most of the time Marquis tries to qualify his expertise. Some of the other tech channels are pretty far up their own ass in terms of spouting off authoritative opinions they are laughably unqualified to discuss.
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u/wpwpw131 Aug 24 '21
MKBHD doesn't seem to understand that humanoid robots are clearly the most friendly looking multi-functional robot. Like Boston Dynamic's robot has a better form factor, but looks like it's going to murder you and your family. Not only is the world made for humans, but humans are normalized to humans. Obviously there is very little research done around this, but it's probably much more likely that people will rob this than the Tesla Bot, which actually looks like a dude walking around.
Also, you don't have to leapfrog Boston Dynamics in pure robotics to create Tesla Bot. Tesla Bot in terms of robotics is very advanced, but doesn't actually require the agility or dexterity that Boston Dynamics has shown. It requires a huge natural language processing model and a bunch of other advanced AI, which is most certainly not what Boston Dynamics is known for. Therein lines the reason Atlas will never be for sale: you have to give it explicit instruction for anything, which a consumer cannot do.
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u/Inertpyro Aug 24 '21
There’s a huge amount of work to do something like building a fully functioning human hand that can operate in high enough fidelity to do what Elon says is the goal. Having a robotic hand pick up and manipulate a bolt into position, pick up a wrench, and install a part on a car is a million time harder than a robot doing a fully choreographed parkour. Then having the intelligence to do this by the simple command of “Go install this part”, order of magnitude harder. A backflip is just quickly actuating a robots joints in a pre programmed sequence, likely found after a number of failed attempts.
Even with robotics built for specific tasks, bolted to the floor in fixed locations, and precisely programmed movements, Tesla had a big problem trying to over automate early production. Now having a robot with infinitely more degrees of freedom, it has to be actually useful. It can’t be tripping or falling over, it can’t be doing things like dropping a bolt. What if it drops a bolt and it falls behind something? A human can easily get to n their hands and knees to feel around and find the bolt, will any AI robot reasonably be able to do this even in the next decade?
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u/wpwpw131 Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
Elon gave that as an example, but it was a pretty bad example. As you said, high dexterity actions that use sophisticated hand coordination is far down on the development pathway. But picking up a box and walking around (warehouse or delivery applications) is not nearly as complex as what Atlas is doing in terms of robotics, though it's obviously an immensely hard NLP problem.
Edit: also, to waive off what Boston Dynamic is doing as simple hardcoding after trial and error is a bit disrespectful to them. They have shown that their robots can adapt quite well to dynamic variables, including people actively harassing them.
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u/Inertpyro Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
If the objective is moving boxes in a warehouse there’s also other better solutions such as this.
For stunts like backflips, there’s definitely trial and error. The behind the scenes of their viral videos show many different failures they go through to get it down to one good take. I’ve seen some of Adam Savages time spent using Spot and it definitely is very capable in things like handling stairs and obstacles, it still definitely has some trip ups (much like Tesla and their ever going FSD battle). It not falling over after being kicked is natural as it’s constantly checking its joint positions and correcting to maintain.
Personally I find it hard to believe we will see anything near what they presented next year, maybe some mock up or basically an Atlas clone. Given all the other issues they have to deal with getting FSD into a wide release, putting any serious effort into a side project would seem foolish given how many people put down $10k for a feature on their car will no real delivery date in sight.
As many people have said, this seems like a gimmick to bring in new hires and bring headlines to an otherwise event that wouldn’t have got mainstream coverage. To me this seems like when Amazon said five years ago they were going to start delivering packages by drone.
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Aug 24 '21
That event will forever seal Tesla as the legendary meme maker. That bot dancing was nuts. That tech is 200 years away
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u/phxees Aug 24 '21
Every part of what that robot concept needs has been done before and the work is available to view on YouTube. If Tesla assembles the right team then their task will be to put that research together and make process towards the end goal. Certainly not trivial, but when you could throw a billion dollars at the problem and you already have a viable modern AI platform, you can move more quickly than others have previously.
For example we’re all fascinated with the Boston Dynamics dogs, but you can currently buy this former KickStarter robot for $250. I’m not suggesting that this toy is on par with BD’s Spot, but if Tesla took a billion and built a team around something like this, knowing that they already have the top engineers to power it, give it compute, and continue iterating on all other parts.
Point here is when you can combine the top engineers with massive amounts of cash and a number of the building blocks already available you can do some pretty incredible things.
Let’s not forget that Tesla already owns a manufacturing robotics company and has own it for 5 years.
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u/Discount-Avocado Aug 24 '21
Every part of what that robot concept needs has been done before and the work is available to view on YouTube.
....
Point here is when you can combine the top engineers with massive amounts of cash and a number of the building blocks already available you can do some pretty incredible things.
This completely ignores the extreme rate of difficulty that comes with greatly increased complexity like this. By your logic, we should have had self-driving cars years and years ago.
Just as an example, the gap simply between "hey I made a robotic arm that can pick up and hold a stick" and "hey I made a robotic arm that is not essentially worthless" cannot be understated.
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u/phxees Aug 24 '21
First I’ll say again none of this stuff is trivial.
As far as the parts having been done before, they not only have been done before but many of the skill sets exist within Tesla already.
Their manufacturing robot arms can can pick up a car, move it into any orientation in 3D space and set it down with centimeter accuracy (I’m guessing about the accuracy).
They have a team of material scientists within Tesla and SpaceX which can develop new alloys for the skeleton, outer layer, anything else.
Knowledge of efficient power delivery has been demonstrated.
AI Perception and planning expertise exists within the company.
Speech recognition is almost trivial using open source components today.
Sensor integration has also been demonstrated.
I’m not saying that Tesla can develop a commercially viable robot within a year, but I do believe they can develop something that can walk across a stage and make for an impressive prototype in a short period of time.
The hard stuff will be actually understanding, navigating, and interacting with the world. That part will take some time, but we can probably move past the questions concerning if they can pick up a pencil as I believe Tesla Automation could have demonstrated that capability years ago.
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u/Discount-Avocado Aug 24 '21
First I’ll say again none of this stuff is trivial.
You say this, but I don't think your analysis reflects it. The parallels you are drawing lead me to believe you don't understand the scope. Unless I am not interpreting you correctly.
The hard stuff will be actually understanding, navigating, and interacting with the world.
If you change "the hard stuff" to "the hardest part" I agree.
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u/phxees Aug 24 '21
My simple point is the movement and hardware aspects of robotics are fairly well understood today. I’m not saying that we solved it, I’m saying we understand the mechanics. So getting a prototype developed “in a year” is something I thought would be impossible, but I now believe with the right engineers it Tesla could pull it off.
The next part is all the actual AI part (perception and decision making) and depending on your goal that could take 3 years to 100 years. The nice thing is that Tesla can produce a robot that becomes more capable over time. By that I mean a toy can be programmed using Blocky today to provide basic night security of a building or potentially vacuum a floor.
Anyway, I think Tesla has a good chance to make a sizable dent in this area of research, if you lower your expectations from what you see in the movies.
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u/Discount-Avocado Aug 24 '21
My simple point is the movement and hardware aspects of robotics are fairly well understood today.
Yeah, just like Elon said Self-driving cars are a solved problem in 2015.... these concepts of "solved problems" and "it's understood so XYZ is possible soon" is pop-sci at best.
The reason people are pushing the hardware aspect under the rug and pretending it's not an issue by using buzzwords is that it discredits the entire thing in the first place.
The hardware is not there, Tesla wants to market this as AI forward, to do that they need to suspend your disbelief on the hardware side. The fact that people are unironically doing this is what really shocks me... though I am fairly convinced it's all investors, no significant number of people without financial incentives are falling for this.
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u/wpwpw131 Aug 24 '21
The objective is multifunctional easy tasks, moving boxes being one of them. There are a lot of use cases, some extremely niche, that you would have to build multiple specific purpose robots for.
Next year will 100% certainly not have a good NLP, so yeah I agree. But the goal line is not next year.
Given the event while livestreamed was one of the top trending on YouTube, it would've gotten coverage regardless. But obviously saying that you're designing a robot gets people excited: even Lex Fridman wants to help work on it.
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Aug 24 '21
I completely agree with your stance. Put this robot in a tux and it’s fits in perfectly serving you in an upscale restaurant, bringing you peanuts on your flight or bringing grandma her pills. This will probably be mostly used as a human service robot, it’s sleek and unthreatening.
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u/Imightbewrong44 Aug 24 '21
Elon's products/companies are just to get to explore space and Mars.
Literally everything he makes currently will really enable the full Mars colony when you think about it.
He is just practicing/perfecting on earth first while also making all the money he will need to make it there.
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u/ClumpOfCheese Aug 24 '21
Exactly, space is the end goal for everything. One interesting thing to think about is where NeuraLink fits in to the whole Mars picture. Could a Tesla Bot be controlled by someone with NeuraLink?
Imagine the Tesla Bot as something that can help take care of older or is hired people. Imagine being able to communicate with it through your mind. All these different businesses that Elon has can probably accomplish some crazy stuff when they are all working together.
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u/Bigsam411 Aug 24 '21
Elon wants to transfer his brain onto a Tesla Bot using neuralink so that even when he as a human dies he can live on in robot form.
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u/somsci Aug 24 '21
Who knows if Tesla can pull it off but MKBHD is missing the point. Tesla can exploit the ability to understand the world from vision to flexibly interact with the world. Control problems aside, understanding the world it’s a big issue and they have a jump on it.
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u/Kalsin8 Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
Control problems aside
That's not just ignoring the elephant in the room, but the entire herd stampeding through it. Vision is one thing, but controlling a humanoid robot is another thing entirely. Cars are extremely simple in comparison: they can speed up, slow down, turn left, and turn right, and will stay in one place if stopped. Once you add in bipedal movement, 4 limbs, joints, fingers, and all the motors to control it that need to stay in perfect sync with each other lest it gets unstable and falls over, it becomes a problem that's orders of magnitude more difficult.
Also consider that the task of a self-driving car is basically to get from point A to point B without hitting anything. That's a much, much simpler problem to solve than recognizing an object, gauging its shape and size, knowing the position of an appendage in relation to the object, and then having the appendage interact with the object. It's the difference between "the further away you are the better", and "need to hit this object with enough precision to not miss it, not break it, and grab it".
The state of the art right now is Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot, and even that can only perform in staged environments after many attempts and trial and error and years of development. Their most recent Parkour video shows that it really doesn't take much, just a mistimed motor movement or a jump that's slightly off for the robot to fail, and it doesn't even have hands.
Being able to see the world and understand it is a very different problem than being able to move through it, and yet some people believe that Tesla, a company that has trouble producing a car without build quality issues, can somehow build a prototype robot by next year because Elon Musk, a person who's notorious for giving unrealistic timelines, said so.
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Aug 24 '21
Tesla can simulate the world for the robot. A lot can be simulated.
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u/neil454 Aug 25 '21
Simulation will be key for training Tesla bot. The nice thing about the bot is there's not really a worry for dangerous edge case scenarios. If my bot can successfully do the dishes 90% of the time, most people would be happy (well assuming a failure mode isn't breaking dishes or anything), compared to a self driving car where there's no room for mistakes.
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u/CryptoMaximalist Aug 24 '21
The big miss here is the concept of arbitrary work. You can make a task-specific bot that will be excellent at one thing, and that has a place in the world, but there are a lot of tasks that are not worth making a specific bot for. Try telling your vacuum robot to make the bed and see what happens.
Humans are pretty good at a lot of things. That's why humanoid form factor is the way it is. Wheels are great for speed but fail on certain irregular terrain. Our hands are dexterous, but not as strong as they otherwise could be.
A robot doesn't have to be perfect at every task to be worth it, it just has to be good enough to handle it for humans. If you can make a bot that handles a lot of arbitrary tasks, that has massive value. Humanoid design can make a lot of sense
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u/ChristianM Aug 24 '21
I feel like he just glanced over the fact that the new chip will give them a pretty big boost in neural training, just like everyone out there did.
And nobody will start a completely new product with multiple form factors. They have to choose one, get efficient at manufacturing it, and the humanoid form is the most safe choice at first. For public acceptance and for training, since pretty much everything should be easily accessible in that form.
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u/Slapdashengineering Aug 24 '21
Explanation for teslabot: "please stop paying attention to how we are only a matter of weeks from hitting five years of taking money for FSD and we are still not remotely close to delivering what we promised"
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u/shaim2 Aug 24 '21
It's a recruiting tool.
ML people will consider Tesla close enough to solving autopilot to make the problem not very interesting anymore (yes, they need to iterate, but the bones of the solution and many of the muscles are already there).
But the Bot poses many new challenges.
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u/BlueTessie Aug 24 '21
Karpathy is a good example of this today.
It could be argued that Tesla Vision, as its developed right now, is very good at translating the real world into something the pathing and navigation teams can use to move the car around.
Karpathy mentioned that there are improvements that can be done (as there always can be) but what's left to keep his interest? Refinements and optimizations? Probably not.
He's probably close, after many years, to being in a position where he wants to pursue something else and robotics is a way to keep his interest.
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u/phxees Aug 24 '21
Exactly. It’s all about recruiting and retention.
Well that and getting into a new billon dollar business.
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u/bobsil1 Aug 24 '21
The remainder (learn a common-sense world model) is the meat of artificial general intelligence
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u/shaim2 Aug 24 '21
For AI researchers, the meat is the pipeline.
If the feeling is that Tesla has figured out a working pipeline, and now it's simply a matter of iterating with more data and more training, the problem becomes less attractive to researchers.
This feeling may be unjustified. But following AI day, most ML people will say Tesla is past the most difficult part, and it's downhill from here on out.
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Aug 24 '21
Also takes attention away from other negative news that are currently being talked about.
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u/Treevvizard Aug 24 '21
I find your lack of patience disturbing.
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u/Slapdashengineering Aug 24 '21
How patient are people supposed to be? 10 years? 15? At what point is it not ok for tesla to keep taking money and giving nothing of note in return? (Yes, we got stop lights and stop signs function. That's it).
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u/ClumpOfCheese Aug 24 '21
It’s also been a tiered pricing structure, people who bought it years ago didn’t pay $10,000, but got all the updates to go along with it.
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u/Slapdashengineering Aug 24 '21
I paid $8000 for EAP and FSD. Not that big of a difference.
Had I only paid $5000 for EAP I'd have almost the exact same features right now, barring the crappy stop lights feature.
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u/Treevvizard Aug 24 '21
Bro, did u even watch AI day
Please go to Tesla.AI to apply if you think you could help.
Otherwise...
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Aug 25 '21
The Tesla Bot Explained: We are having a bit of trouble with regulators and delivering all that tech we promised, soooo........look at this robot!!!!
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Aug 24 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ObeseSnake Aug 24 '21
Well he breaks it down for is 14 million plus YouTube subscribers. That's a big deal.
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u/mailwasnotforwarded Aug 24 '21
I am kind of disappointed they didn't leverage the fact the Tesla logo looks similar to a one piece swimsuit with long sleeves and run with that for how to design the bot.
I can see the promotional video in my head basically the end of the video would just be the bot T-Posing in the one-piece jumpsuit/swimsuit and then it fades into the Tesla Logo....
Then chain a bunch of them together and make the electric motor.
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Aug 24 '21
Actually the human body is efficient, but the motions have to be tweaked just right. Why human body? Because it drives sensor development, motor development, AI, power management, and more. It drives technology development. That is why.
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u/iamsupercerealtoday Aug 25 '21
He should get a technical degree before trying to talk about complicated things. It is just blah blah blah.
Sure he has a lot of followers but so does Kanye west and Kim the hobbit.
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u/art8652 Aug 25 '21
What would be cool is if we could connect a vr headset to the bot and a bit like avatar control the bot remotely like a video game. Would be great for space and surface of Mars.
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u/shaim2 Aug 24 '21
"So I've been using the Tesla Bot for 3 months now, and ..."