Orestis Skoutellas’ Post

Wearing matching hats so we don't lose each other, we walked all around the countless booths at #CES2024. Here's our top highlights. - motor-on-the-wheel electric motorcycle from Verge Motorcycles has only 80 employees! After literally reinventing the wheel on their $30k offering, they're now working on their autonomous-ish new $50k one. - indoor smoker from GE, after years in baking through a wonderful innovation process. Smoking your meat or salmon indoors is now more consistent, rain or shine, using the same pellets as any other smoker. - AI-infused binoculars from Swarovski Optik allow you to identify the bird you're looking at. Using GPS to first shortlist potential bird candidates, their classification occurs on-edge and had a decent <2s inference lag. - It's about $1500 total to have a Mon-Fri normal-sized booth at the startup section. Also, entering CES for subsequent years (after your first one at $149), is free. Hence the 200k crowd. - Everyone loves John Deere hats. If only we had a dollar everytime someone walked up to us asking where's their booth to get one. Even Caterpillar Inc. offered us their hats, if we promised to stop wearing the green ones :) - watching a movie at the Sphere for first-time is certainly a great appetizer to what the future of movies and the power of Vision Pro can be (or not)

Few people believe in humanoid robots, and I sure wasn't one of them before Austin's IEEE's Humanoids 2023 conference. Here's my takeaways. - 🤖 Why humanoid? Humanoid companies are building one robot capable of all tasks that a human can do, instead of a different robot specific for every task. Choosing general purpose over specialization is a tough promise, yet can bear large fruit: the economies of scale from building and maintaining only one robot with only one operating system are immense. - 😎 Tailwinds: At least for the next 10 years, labor shortage in the nursing, manufacturing, logistics and elderly care sectors is a huge pain for employers. On top of that, birth rates are dropping, life expectancy is increasing, and the % of population that is retired is going up. - ☁ Headwinds: Existing buildings have inefficiencies in their “automation” lines, which are currently filled by humans doing repetitive, boring and sometimes dangerous tasks. But when new buildings are built in the future, probably humans (and thus humanoids) will be out-designed. - 🐘 No mention of the elephant: A lot of robotics companies have a noble-by-public-opinion customer (e.g. academia) on their marketing materials. More often than not, defense contracting is often the deeper and silent revenue stream. Maritime robotics is a big example of that (e.g. Saildrone), and one can think of plenty of defense applications of humanoids in the future of warfare. - 💰 ROI. If one reliable $100k humanoid is able to automate 2 shifts of human labor per day (it needs to charge on the third shift), work weekends and doesn’t become unhappy, then the ROI makes good sense. Fact-dump for curious engineers: - Price is ~$100k (1k annual production), with CEO promises for much less - Actuators are electric and built in-house, due to custom needs, high market cost and medium complexity. Excluding hands, there’s 31 total: 7 arm, 6 leg, 2 head, 3 body - Autonomy was not evident. The distance from marketing videos to reality is vast. For example, Boston Dynamics had 10 engineers working for 1 year just to produce their viral video. At the conference, there was no live demo of autonomous walking or any object manipulation. - Weight is ~60kg today, but some promise as low as 30kg by moving from actuators to pulleys. - Battery is ~1kWh, 60V today. It’s ~10% of the humanoid’s weight. - Head exists mostly to make the robot look a bit friendlier. There’s a debate between making it human-like vs not. - Legs is where everyone is headed, but wheel-base is a good stepping stone, since ADA floor characterizes most places. - Hands are very tricky and their frequency of breaking in falls keeps CTOs up at night. If existent to begin with, few hands are built haptic and their actuators range from 6 to 19 per hand. - RL vs MBC debate remains, yet all-RL robots demonstrated decent stability walking. - LLM use was fairly surface level and more of a sideline feature. - Size of companies is ~100 people

One inspiring podcast, two inmate conversations and three humbling months later...