There’s still a ways to go on visuospatial capabilities.
Engineers are not the only dependency on labor. I gather that Tesla had a LOT of trouble getting industrial robots to handle sheets of very flexible material (cloth, or insulation), so still needed human workers on the assembly line. But obviously that’s a solvable problem in robotics.
Agreed, there are a number of areas that are super-cursed. soft bodies are one of them. one thing you’ll notice in EV manufacturing is a lot of high voltage components are stampings or rigid conductors, not flexible wires. Wiring harnesses require people. stacking/bolting rigid parts to create combined mechanical /electrical connections doesn’t.
Product design that does away with flexible wires entirely is a big part of design for manufacture and design for automated assembly.
Anytime you’re handling flexible foam sheets … why aren’t you rigidifying them? why aren’t you just producing foam in place. Refrigerators are a picture perfect example of how to build with foam, you produce it in the cavity where it’s needed, don’t handle it manually.
Better robotics could change a lot of those assumptions.
In my youth, I learned to use a ball-and-chain flail as a weapon. Yes, it’s tricky (and hitting yourself somewhere delicate while learning it is no fun) — but it’s a learnable skill. Humans learn to make beds, and that’s even harder. This could even be learned in sim-to-real, if we had good enough physics models of flexible objects coupled to fluid dynamics — and that’s a software problem.
Engineers are not the only dependency on labor. I gather that Tesla had a LOT of trouble getting industrial robots to handle sheets of very flexible material (cloth, or insulation), so still needed human workers on the assembly line. But obviously that’s a solvable problem in robotics.
Agreed, there are a number of areas that are super-cursed. soft bodies are one of them. one thing you’ll notice in EV manufacturing is a lot of high voltage components are stampings or rigid conductors, not flexible wires. Wiring harnesses require people. stacking/bolting rigid parts to create combined mechanical /electrical connections doesn’t.
Product design that does away with flexible wires entirely is a big part of design for manufacture and design for automated assembly.
Anytime you’re handling flexible foam sheets … why aren’t you rigidifying them? why aren’t you just producing foam in place. Refrigerators are a picture perfect example of how to build with foam, you produce it in the cavity where it’s needed, don’t handle it manually.
Looks like I have to rush out that next part.
Better robotics could change a lot of those assumptions.
In my youth, I learned to use a ball-and-chain flail as a weapon. Yes, it’s tricky (and hitting yourself somewhere delicate while learning it is no fun) — but it’s a learnable skill. Humans learn to make beds, and that’s even harder. This could even be learned in sim-to-real, if we had good enough physics models of flexible objects coupled to fluid dynamics — and that’s a software problem.