Look at it this way. Useful Humanoid robots are at least as hard as useful self-driving cars. It took about 20 years to get from the DARPA Grand Challenge (can drive OK on an empty road) to Waymo (take one across town today.).

I think some of the car role will port to robot role.

Vision for cars already includes object detection, and the better that is, the better robot object detection gets. The same for "human ran out on road" would work for "walking in house, small human is now in front of me, stop!".

I wonder how much of the one will port to the other. A house has paths aka "roads", inside and out. Places the robot may walk, and not. So path navigation is a thing too. Maybe 'getting around' is mostly solved, while of course other challenges are still there.

Sort of replying to others in this part, the reason people are all hung up on humanform, is that our entire world is made for humans. Whether stairs, doors, sidewalks, doorknobs, cupboards, or even space to walk in a small kitchen... it's all made to work with human shape and size.

(Yes, while there is wheelchair access mandated, that doesn't extend to the inside of every home, and all the spaces in homes, and even then everything we have is designed to be operated by fingers/arms/hands.)

So if you solve humanform, the robot can go anywhere and manipulate/do anything a human can. That means no change to the environment when you get one. Right or wrong, that's why everyone is after humanform.

ASIMO is 25 years old. PETMAN is 16 years old and Atlas is 12.

> Humanoid robots are at least as hard as useful self-driving cars

A self-driving car only has to do one thing - drive. It's also got a stable wheeled base and only a couple of degrees of freedom - got to steer and regulate it's speed.

Even if the only thing you wanted the humanoid robot to do is drive your car, it'd be massively harder for it since it's got all those degrees of freedom, will be bouncing around in the drivers seat, and presumably doesn't even know how to drive.

If the humanoid is more than a gimick - meant to be general purpose, then it needs an AGI brain and ability to learn for itself. It's not going to be learning in a simulator like your FSD car - it's be learning on the road like your teenage kid.

It’s actually going faster because it does not require public approval the same way that driving cars do because you’re in public space.

We’re seeing a lot of robotic trials happening in private warehouses and on private test ranges at pretty rapid scale

Beyond that the methods for transfer learning behavior cloning behavior authoring are very robust so that I can get joint angles directly from a human via instrumentation through vision or even commodity sensors which captured trajectories that can be immediately applied to robotic joint positions.

The real challenge is actually capturing demonstration recordings from humans because it’s the hardest thing to instrument. The core task is instrumenting data capture of existing human tasks that are not done through machines, such that they can transfer to machines.

This is easiest done with existing human operated robots because the instrumentation is free, so data can go directly into real2sim2real pipelines.

There might seem counterintuitive but most of the actual technical bits and bites are already there it’s re-orienting the economic and logistical process of labor execution that is the major challenge.

I will say though, I’m seeing less and less barriers there as time goes on. Employers really want to not have to hand human employees

(a few specific towns, which have done various things to smooth operating conditions for Waymo.)

It's useful, don't get me wrong, but when Waymo can handle Cairo and Rome, I'll consider it a solved problem.