Maybe the perfect roadmap says the trash picker needs $600B investment and will cost $4M per unit in 10 years time, if we solve all the problems.

That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.

edit:

> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software

Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.

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jrowen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

We already have versions of these robots. I don't think it's as wildly unsolved as you make it out to be. A few key efficiencies gained in any part of the process could tip the scales. I would bet something decent is on the market within 10 years.

If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.

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robotresearcher 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Boston Dynamics has the best robot mechatronics in the world, and the company is passed around between deep-pocket owners repeatedly because no one can figure out how to make products that pay for themselves. They have been trying since 1992.

iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.

But yeah, it's probably straightforward, right?

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jrowen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Again I don't think it's any less straightforward than "give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software". The whole point is they can do better than us on these tasks.

	▲	robotresearcher an hour ago \| parent [-]
		“Give you for free” is a rhetorical device that focuses the discussion on the remainder that I didn’t give you. I didn’t make any claims about the relative difficultly.