The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal. Ceiling mounted is actually a much more plausible option. Next most likely is something more like R2D2. A rolling garbage can with an arbitrary number of specialized appendages. Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.

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kevin_thibedeau an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Their benefit is they can operate in any space designed for a human without custom modification. No wires to get in the way with an assistant robot that interacts with the existing built world.

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bryanlarsen 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Much smaller robots will co-exist in a world with humans a lot more smoothly than anything human shaped & sized.

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blm126 a minute ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not so sure. If you could rebuild every human space and tool from scratch, you are probably right. However, we live in buildings filled with stairs. We've got tall cabinets with things tucked in them. We've got lawn mowers and snow blowers and leaf blowers and cars. Making a humanoid robot is a much harder problem if you want a cool demo. If you actually want to deploy robots in billions of homes, it might just be the only answer.

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pulvinar 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, once they can be made to quietly jump on to a counter, like a cat.

	▲	bryanlarsen 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They need a way to get onto counters, climb stairs, manipulate objects, et cetera. But all of the necessary capabilities do not need to be self-contained. Humans achieve their amazing flexibility through tool use, and so will robots. And in many cases those tools will be other robots. One robot could boost another onto the counter and then they both could get out of the way, unlike a robot large enough to reach up to the counter.

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hathawsh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We might be at the beginning of a golden age for inventors. Robots of all shapes and sizes, with highly variable price points and specialization. Still, the first challenge for R2D2 is probably stairs.

	▲	chamomeal 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It’ll be like phones. All kinds of whacky fun designs, before converging on a single black rectangle. Robots will all be flat black rectangles

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Marha01 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The big benefit of humanoids is that they can be trained from captured human actions (egocentric datasets made by humans).

	▲	jephs an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Do we really have to capture the humans? Legal says that introduces a whole slew of issues.
	▲	komodo99 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> captured human actions Or just some dude on remote. (Get in the robot, Shinji!)

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arbuge 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

How does R2D2 climb stebs?