In a different thread there was an argument about the relative futility of some of today's robotics experiments [0]. As it is sometimes typical on HN, the poster with a message outside the "go team" cargo-cult mentality wasn't very welcome. I happen to think he had a very interesting point. And that point translates well into this thread.

Why don't we see practical applications of all of these robotics experiments? The answer is very simple really: Most of them are relatively pointless and add very little to the robotics knowledge-base that will be needed to really move robotics forward into real-world applied robots.

Think of something like robotics vacuum cleaners. Nothing whatsoever innovative about any of them. It's a wheeled platform that has been in use in hobby and research robotics since, well, forever. The '70's and '80's were full of robots with this basic platform. What changed? Electronics got better, batteries smaller, microprocessors more capable, manufacturing more efficient. What was retained and reused from prior research? Probably not much.

I started in college with the goal of becoming a robotics engineer. An EE with specialization in robotics. It didn't take long for me to realize that the field wasn't as interesting and exciting as I made it out to be in my mind. The R2D2's and C3-PO's were nowhere to be found and were easily decades away from becoming reality. If I wanted to be in robotics I would end-up making industrial manipulators or things with motors that we would all pretend were robots. That's a pet peeve of mine. Battlebots had nothing whatsoever to do with robotics. It was about a bunch of remote controlled machines. Not robots.

I digress. The point is that I was really excited about the field until I realized what I wanted to do would have to wait 50 or 100 years. I wanted to work on Commander Data, not a mindless pick-and-place machine.

And so I begun to dissect things and think about what it would take to get there. Do we learn anything by making humanoid-looking little robots out of RC servos? I built a couple. It's an utter waste of time. Nothing whatsoever of value other than to pretend we built a humanoid. Don't get me wrong, it's a great hobby and lots of fun for the kids to learn, but it is far, far away from anything even remotely useful.

In my opinion these are the areas that need a quantum leap in development before robots like Wildcat can become useful and relevant outside the lab:

ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES

This is huge. Motors, gears, springs, pistons and bladders just don't cut it. We need a step change in the performance and capabilities of what we use to do the job of biological muscles. Machines like Wildcat can't operate for days at a time. They use internal combustion engines to power pumps and hydraulic or pneumatic end-effectors to actuate joints. This is lousy. Very little can be learned from trying to operate such machines. You end-up with things like Asimo that walk like they are taking a dump because it is nearly impossible to implement true dynamic gaits because we either can't implement enough degrees of freedom or joint actuation simply isn't up to par.

Artificial muscles that perform well and are energy efficient would revolutionize the field.

ENERGY STORAGE

Thankfully this is something robotics shares with electric cars. We need to do much better than current LiPo cells allow in terms of volumetric power density (at the very least).

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE + CONTROL SYSTEMS

This is a field that has seen advances but is nowhere near where it needs to be. I can teach a five year old kid how to sort and fold a pile of clothes without much effort (other than maintaining his or her attention). It would be very hard to do the same with the AI we have mastered to date. I am talking about having a couple of robot arms and a camera presented with a random pile of clothes and having those clothes sorted and properly folded as a human would. No special mechanics, suction mechanisms or anything like that.

PROCESSING / NEURAL COMPUTING

The AI+CONTROL field ultimately needs far more advanced and energy efficient processing architectures than are commonly available today. Stuffing a robot with a powerful Linux PC provides nowhere near the processing bandwidth needed to perform at a level comparable to a human child. I am not sure what form this step improvement in computing will take, but we need it.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES / DEVELOPMENT AND SIMULATION TOOLS

We are in the dark ages. We need a serious paradigm shift in the way we program computers if we are ever going to even approach something that can compare to the fictional C3-PO or Commander Data ideas.

If you want to contribute to robotics your time and efforts would be far better spent on the above (I am sure there are other areas I have not listed) rather than making little remote-controlled gyro-actuated cubes that link to each other via magnets. I don't know what can be learned from that other than making remote-controlled gyro-actuated little cubes that link together via magnets. Cool toy. Useless for the advancement of robotics. It's almost like spending a lot of time playing chess: You become better at playing chess, a narrow skill, and virtually nothing you do can be translated or reused for other tasks outside of chess. Grandmasters are not genius thinkers, they are simply great chess players and that's it. Master little cubes with gyros and that's all you've mastered.

I have two German Shepherd dogs. I have trained both of them to search for objects I hide anywhere in the house. I show them the object, I let them smell it and then hide the object while they wait in a "sit-stay" well out of sight. Sometimes I'll hide the object deep in a drawer inside a closet in an upstairs bedroom while they wait in the garage with the door closed. These dogs are amazing to watch. They always find what I showed them. Every so often they need a little help (and they ask for it), most of the time they do it on their own. Think about all that is required for an animal to do this spanning a range of capabilities from cognition, perception, sensing, navigation, planning, communications and more.

There is no way a bunch of little blocks or a gasoline-hydraulic-powered machine is helping us advance towards even something as simple, in terms of biological beings, as finding an hidden object using smell. A better place to spend money and resources is in the areas I highlighted above and others I did not mention. Once you "ace" the above, the process of designing and fabricating a mechanical frame with the required capabilities should be an almost academic exercise for any engineer with a moderate range of experience in the electromechanical fields.

Not to minimize Boston Dynamic, but I really think a lot of what they and others are doing is simply burning tax money for no good reason. Well, there is a good reason. The government folks who shovel out the money are easily impressed by this stuff. Nothing really advances but it is impressive as hell. Who knows how much money was burned on the GE walker in the 1960's [1]. I don't know of anything that came out of that project and is in use today. If I gave any reasonably capable team of engineers a few million dollars to play --without a requirement to actually deliver something that works in the real world-- they could build similarly capable machines. There's nothing special about these systems other than they are impressive to the untrained eye.

General Electric built quadrupeds in 1968 [1]. The only reason they didn't perform like the Boston Dynamics rigs is that they did not have access to better computing platforms, sensors and electronics. There is nothing in the Boston Dynamics machines in terms of mechanics or hydraulics that was not available or could not be implemented in 1968. Just look at the video [2] (got to love the sound effects). This machine, all by itself, proves my point about the futility of some of this research. They all put the cart in front of the horse. The GE machine needed better effectors, sensors, energy storage, AI and control. The machine shows the amazing mechanical complexity that was attainable in 1968. Remember, no Solidworks, no microprocessors, no FPGA's, no Linux, just a dude pulling levers. Amazing stuff.

We are simply focusing on and throwing money at the wrong things.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495440

[1] http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/Image.Archive...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGCFLEYakM

EDIT:

Just came across this, which is really cool (1957):

http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=8392