Legged robots overall have more implementation complexity, spend energy just to idle standing up, but can go over much more varied terrain provided the controller is good enough. There are ways to adapt wheeled bases to different terrains (eg. larger wheels, whegs, RHex, rocker-bogies) but we know how to use legs to locomote over many terrains from personal experience, while the perfect wheeled/non-legged locomotion system perhaps remains to be designed.
There's also the way robotics is going toward data-driven methods, which in some forms (ie. imitation learning) require human teleoperation data. Here having the robot mimic the human form makes the mapping from human joints to robot joints easier (compared to other morphologies where you'd need to figure out how to best approximate a human motion with the joints/joint limits your robot has, though this is not impossible).
But yes, for a factory or commercial environment it doesn't make too much sense. It would be cheaper to adapt the environment, and many commercial environments are already designed to be accessible for wheelchair users anyway.
> Besides that, our entire technology is based on the human form. An automobile, for instance, has its controls so made as to be grasped and manipulated most easily by human hands and feet of a certain size and shape, attached to the body by limbs of a certain length and joints of a certain type. Even such simple objects as chairs and tables or knives and forks are designed to meet the requirements of human measurements and manner of working. It is easier to have robots imitate the human shape than to redesign radically the very philosophy of our tools.
I’m willing to bet we’ll have a humanoid robot that can drive a car before we have level 5 autonomous vehicles.
And by can drive a car I mean a general purpose humanoid robot that can do basic household chores like move the car and wash it with a foaming brush and a hose.
I don’t mean the robot will be capable of sitting in any regular car and doing level 5 autonomous driving.
He didn’t craft it for literal interpretation on HN 70 years in the future.
1. Asimov wrote that because he needed robots to be indistinguishable from humans for plot reasons.
2. We do 99% of our tool use with our arms and hands. We are already very good at building robot arms. We are getting better at robot hands. We can build robot legs, but they're very expensive and they pose a major safety risk for the robot itself and surrounding humans (because the robot can fall if there is a failure). For most applications, why not just put biomimetic hands and arms on a rolling base?
Of course, all this humanoid robotics research is still useful because if you can build a fully humanoid robot you can trivially build a torso-on-rolling-base robot. I sort of suspect that most of the humanoid robotics companies already know that the vast majority of their sales will be in that category.
We can have optimized automation in warehouses/logistics, but if you talk to any site manager you learn very quickly that no one wants any downtime or impact to their operation to introduce new machinery or optimize traffic, etc. If it is not built with that from the start it's very hard to introduce it later on unless there is a very clear deployment path and cost structure.
And boy, robotics currently has any of those today. Sure, move those billions in to R&D. Time will tell.
Ok, so maybe a robot with wheels could solve most tasks, but it would still be severely limited: couldn't climb stairs (which would make it unsuitable as a domestic robot in a house or multi-storey flat), couldn't drive a car, truck or any other vehicle designed for humans etc.
Its predecessor was a stair-climbing wheelchair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT
One of the codenames for Segway was "Ginger", a reference to Ginger Rogers, because the codename for iBOT was "Fred Upstairs" (a pun on Fred Astaire).
And the other thing is, why is the washing machine itself not seen as a specialized robot? Like if you're designing a machine to machine machines, doesn't it make sense to revisit the whole thing?