For disabled people who can use their arms and propel themselves, a wheelchair is low-maintenance, dependable, repairable, self-powered, and generic enough for there to be a healthy market and not too much vendor lock-in. Wheelchairs are not necessarily low-tech, but they are fully understandable. If the user of a wheelchair is unable to move themself for whatever reason, any able bodied person can step in and push. These things matter in any situation I think, but they matter even more in an emergency or a war zone.

Exoskeletons can't match that.

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Fargren a day ago | parent | next [-]

All of those are arguments for why robots should generally have wheels rather than legs, except for when legs are specifically needed.

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electroly a day ago | parent | next [-]

Furthermore, mobile robots currently in home use--vacuum and mop robots--are all wheeled, of course. We've shown we can accommodate wheeled robots in the home if we feel like the payoff is worth it.

	▲	ehnto 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well I think wheels match the use case there, a small bot close to the ground with just the one job. I think there will be many wheeled bots to begin with. But long term I don't see that form factor scaling to "able to do all tasks around the house". It's super easy to come up with scenarios that a wheeled bot can't cope with, but again "good enough, cheap enough" will probably see lots of wheeled bots on the market. I am just trying to show why the pioneering companies would be interested in bipedal bots, it's a long term play. Lastly, the elephant in the room is that basically all general purpose bots are a euphemism for military bots that will need to operate in unknowable conditions.

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Jensson a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> except for when legs are specifically needed.

Exactly, we need legs when they are specifically needed, and we already have wheeled robots so building legged robots that can move like a human will cover so many cases we currently cannot cover.

And even more important are arms and hands, and legs is a precursor to that, they are much simpler so its smart to start with legs to then try to make good arms and hands.

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ffsm8 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Give me the option of a humanoid looking across that takes care of all in house chores and one that's that utility based with wheels and arms, I will likely choose the humanoid one even with a 100% premium price.

I mean I wouldn't buy either unless I could be certain it's not uploading all data to the cloud and be fully controlled by a user hostile company, but if we're talking fantasy tech ala Detroit: become human... Yeah, it'd be willing to spend a lot of money to have all chores taken care of by a humanoid robot.

And in before someone talks nonsense again wrt "you already can, just pay someone to do it for you"... I do not want to have strangers in my home. This is also essentially why I wouldn't want any cloud connected bot anywhere innit.

	▲	ehnto 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The cloud situation is where it's probably going to fall down at first (haha). I don't see companies choosing to offer local model integration over the possibility of using the robot as a loss leader to a long term subscription model for access to the compute/inference. But that's going to be hilarious. Imagine your internet goes down while the bot is half way down your stairs, or the in the middle of pouring a drink. Very fun.

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msgodel a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd say the same thing about mobile robots, especially since ADA means most of the public environment should be relatively accessible.