Famous robotist Rodney Brooks has one Blunt message To invest billions in humanoid robot startups for investors: You are wasting your money.
Brooks, who co-established Irobot and spent decades in the MIT, especially doubt about companies such as Tesla and Figure, who are trying to teach them robot mastery by showing them videos of humans for actions. In a new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking”.
Problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 special touch receptors that do not get close to a robot matching. While machine learning changed speech recognition and image processing, those successes manufactured on decades of existing technology to capture the right data. “We do not have such a tradition for touch data,” Brox explains.
Then there is security. Full -size -running humanoid robots pump large scale energy. When they fall, they are dangerous. Physics means that a robot twice from the size of today’s model will pack eight times the harmful energy.
Brooks have predicted that in 15 years, successful “humanoids” robots will actually have wheels, many weapons and special sensors and will leave human form. Meanwhile, he is fully convinced that today’s billions of expensive training are funding experiments which will never be on a scale for mass production.
