Discussion
BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
dataviz1000: Here is a 60 Minutes piece showing Boston Dynamics Atlas working in a car factory in the United States. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6ISdRkS37I
u1hcw9nx: Hyundai vs BMW, where is Tesla?
tw-20260303-001: It's coming, next year, there will be a million of them.
amelius: Meanwhile China has dark factories.
Zqwlpaj: It is a pilot project. German pilot projects rarely go anywhere. If this succeeds against all odds, I hope for BMW that the robots are buying cars, too.
notahacker: Yeah. Feels kind of insignificant considering the amount of non-humanoid robots they've used on production lines for the last few decades and lack of any claims to be "fully autonomous" or for the humanoid robots to be performing particularly advanced tasks
r33b33: So their cars will get cheaper, right... right???
pinkmuffinere: I think this is going to be bad for BMW, and bad for the current robotics-summer. I _hope_ that’s not the case, I’d love for robotics to get deployed more widely in manufacturing. But I’m pretty sure it will be. I think the chances of meaningful success would be higher with non-humanoid robotics
moogly: Will they dance? I've yet to see someone demo a humanoid robot doing something useful. Clearly, making them dance can't be that difficult.
simondotau: Tesla beat Hyundai and BMW to this meaningless announcement a year ago, and have already progressed from that to the inevitable “oh yeah, this doesn’t actually work yet.”Give Hyundai and BMW time.
krona: This is top-tier vagueposting.
ge96: Not sure what the drawers are on the robot but one of the humanoid robots I saw changed its own battery that was pretty cool (I think it had 2).
numpad0: Why doesn't anybody do the shoulder complex right? It gives me itches to scratch.
baxtr: On the moon or on Mars?
dmix: Seems to be this European robotics companyhttps://robotics.hexagon.com/product/https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
pinkmuffinere: Feel free to ask for more details if you have specific questions! I worked in robotics for many years, I have some decent familiarity with this space. Here’s some more detailed thoughts “for free”:Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.There are many good practitioners that write about these and other limitations, I think Rodney Brooks has some good discussion of it
bitwize: There's also the idea that a humanoid robot can learn to imitate human action just by watching it, thanks to AI magic!
okokwhatever: And this is how it starts in EU
torginus: My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
Maxion: Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from which someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau where they run some simple calculations. Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.I wish I was making this stuff up.
kingjimmy: They make connecting SAP so difficult... this is the only way
