Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its diaper, with everything that entails: identifying and eliminating all traces of waste from all crevices, applying diaper cream as necessary, unfolding and positioning the new diaper correctly and quickly, always using enough but never too much force... not to mention the nightmare of providing any guarantees about safety at mass-market scale. Even one maimed baby, or even just a baby some robot neglects to prevent from falling off the changing table, is game over for that line of robots.
Is there any research program that could claim to tackle this? It's so far beyond folding laundry and doing dishes, which are already quite difficult.
I wouldn't bet my life on this tech _never_ materializing, but I would mistrust anyone who claimed it was feasible with today's tech. It calls for an entirely different kind of robotic perception, feedback, and control.
This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course, your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that I'd risk an infant in its grippers.
after fiddling for 10 minutes with the baby, while being late for the day job, because it KEEPS ON MOVING while your changing the FRIGGING diaper that is full of FECES I can assure you that my tolerance is clearly above zero :-)
> but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years
This is wildly optimistic. I quit working in robotics because I got tired of all the bullshit promises everybody made all the time. I'm not saying robotics isn't advancing or the work is unimportant, but the spokespeople are about as reliable as Musk when it comes to timelines.
I doubt it will happen in 10 years, even with a constrained environment and hardware that costs well into 6 digits.
I think GP was basically talking about doing it on a doll. As in, a robot in 1-3 years might be able to change diapers with occasional success, but half the tries will result in a dismembered diaper user: we'd use dolls in this scenario, since dismembering babies is taboo and generally frowned upon within the robotics community.
It will have to be a robot doll. Changing my baby's diaper was a piece of cake until he learned how to escape midway through the process. Babies can be surprisingly hard to restrain!
Musk said something the other day about SpaceX being an operation that converts impossible to late.
> your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero.
Um, no it's not. Is absolutely zero tolerance. There is not weasel words out of this. If a robot was to cause any pain to the baby, there would be no remorse. There would be no front of mind thoughts to not repeat the same thing the next time. There would be no guilt for causing pain to the baby.
Why you would "basically" this the way you have is disturbing.
Sorry, this is me communicating like an engineer. In a technical sense risk of anything can only approach zero: never actually get there. I meant that there should be essentially zero chance, similar to holding a baby in your arms or putting it in a high chair, and probably less chance of injury than driving in a car with a baby in a car-seat. Basically zero.
I don't think the parent comment advocates for hurting babies. It just, probably correctly, states that cherry picked examples won't be representative of roboty safety with infants in the next years, but that true safety will improve over time as well.
> Zero tolerance
Well that is simply not possible. Even mothers drop their babies to the floor sometimes (very infrequently, I hope). Even for humans the tolerance isn't zero.
real world treatment of babies is very different from the zero tolerance you've described. From pregnant mothers smoking/drinking to medical care unavailability to doctor errors to various toxin contaminated baby products and the environment (Flint leaded water comes to mind) to babies left in hot cars and other abuse to poor availability of daycare (even less availability of daycare good for mental development) to ...
Granted most of this is unintentional. The same about injuries by robots - we're supposedly talking about unintentional injuries here. So, if robots save money/time/effort (like Flint water switch) i'm not sure that the society would suddenly change its current approach to unintentional baby injuries and implement zero tolerance.
To illustrate - Uber self-driving killed a woman, and another self-driving maimed a woman in SF. Uber case was an obvious criminal gross negligence running with explicitly disabled emergency braking), and the company wiggled out of it in part by having to shut down the self-driving. Where is in SF it was an obvious case of technology limitations and teething issue, so there were no real severe consequences as we're much more tolerant to honest technological accidents (at least when they happen not to us personally).
> From pregnant mothers smoking/drinking to medical care unavailability to doctor errors to various toxin contaminated baby products and the environment [...]
You don't even need to go so extreme. Driving involves risk. And so does getting out of bed at all (or staying in bed..)
If the chance of the robot hurting your kid becomes orders of magnitude smaller than the chance of getting hit by a freak asteroid, you can probably call that save enough, even if it's not strictly speaking zero.
> It would require an entirely different kind of robotics.
I was 100% with you until suddenly this technical claim pops out. You might feel this way, and might be right, but why? Changing a diaper is crazy hard, I absolutely agree, but you seem to be just declaring from vibes that we 'require an entirely different kind of robotics'. Can you put your finger on why this is true?
Not nitpicking for the fun of it - I'm genuinely interested. Robot person.
The main limitation right now is that robotics are very limited in their sense of touch.
After that, they are limited in their understanding of physics. After that, perhaps understanding of physics and physiology would come into play - but perhaps superhuman perception and reaction time could reduce the need for intuitive understanding physics and physiology.
s/"physics and physiology"/"baby behavior and physiology"
in case anyone was wondering why I proffered "physics" in two different sentences.
I think it needs a water gun. If the diaper was a spray on layered rubber, like a sponge then an impermeable layer, and then you sprayed a solvent to clear the old diaper and poop and then spray on a new one. You'd just need to slot them into styrups briefly or some socks on strings to move the legs into a good position.
But can this be done with baby skin and lung safe chemicals at a reasonable temperature?
Point being humanoid designs for robots that manipulate objects designed for humans are an artificially hard problem we have decided to fail at solving.
Yeah I also think we should just replace the baby with a spherical squishy lump of celluloid-wrapped fat with no limbs. Much more convenient.
It's more common to replace them with dogs.
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Zero failure rates not just 0.000…1 are a very different and unrealistic bar. Software must be treated as actively malicious from a hardware standpoint from multiple bit flip errors etc. So it comes down to designing hardware capable of the task that’s also incapable of causing harm even with hardware defects etc.
Meanwhile it must also be strong enough to move and restrain a range of infants which is a level of force capable of harm without any possibility to fail deadly.
You can't get to zero failures.
You might always get hit by a freak accident. Or an unlucky combination of cosmic rays replaces all your software (including all the redundant and fail safe systems) all at once.
This is all extremely unlikely, but not literally 0.
Note: I specifically mention an unlucky combination of cosmic rays. You can protect against a single or even a handful of cosmic rays just fine.
> You can't get to zero failures.
For this device you agree with mine and the original posters position.
A Diaper however can be designed not to risk grievous bodily harm for an infant when used correctly by a human. If someone doesn’t change their kids dipper that’s neglect by the parents not a negative news story for the manufacturers. We’re a long way from this point when it comes to robots.
Well, Mr Robot person, would you let today's robotics change your clothes right now? If you wouldn't, then why would you allow it any where near a baby? If you would, why? What robot with what tech would you allow?
I don't see why that would be so hard. This is potentially easier than reliably shooting guns at people.
That machine will look like a bean bag couch in rough shape of a giant human hand, with few of cooperative work robotic arms. The couch part hugs and secures all limbs of the baby to into the party escort submission position, then the cobots move in to find the disassembly markers on the diaper to tear it open to remove it. Then a showerhead, then a hair dryer, then baby powder sprayer can be brought out and ran to clean any residues and take care of rashes. Finally, the new diaper can be brought in, baby wrapped, and the double sided tapes on it lightly pressed on to secure it.
The entire machine would probably cost less than 10 million USD per unit if mass produced at reasonable scales, and most technological elements needed in such machines would be readily available.
How many diapers have you changed, out of curiosity? I've changed maybe 5,000 diapers (4 kids non-primary caregiver), and I feel confident that a shower head + hair dryer is not going to be safe or in fact work at all in many circumstances.
Never actually... I think the key for the machine is to secure the baby in such ways that the pelvis stays at the same position in space, without breaking bones or tearing muscles. That's normally not possible because a human hand isn't big enough and grippy enough to hold them that way, and that allows the baby to slip out or wiggle around. But if you could, and if the I-shaped types of diapers are tolerated, then the problem reduces into the matter of washing the bottom floating in space and wrapping them with the diapers. Legs can probably be kept out of the way by some cushions.
> washing the bottom
What about washing all the other places where baby's poop can get? (Legs, feet, hands, arms with some difficulty, all the way up the back, etc)
Showerhead can still do that.
You can pretty much put water everywhere on a human body, as long as you make sure that they can still breath.
Legs and arms and the back etc are fairly trivial to clean with a showerhead. Skinfolds are where I would expect problems.
Btw, your system doesn't need to handle all corner cases of cleaning to be useful. It needs to not hurt anyone (in all cases); handle most common cases of cleaning; and ideally alert you when it can't clean some spots.
But even a system that can't alert you is still useful for a parent, because the parent can still look over the child afterwards.
> This is potentially easier than reliably shooting guns at people.
I suspect the shooting guns robots will be used against populations the owner considers sub-human, and reliability (accuracy in this context) is not a concern as long as it doesn't turn around 180degs.
You know they are adding AI to drones fighting in Ukraine (on both sides). Mostly to deal with signalling scamming that prevents remote operators from controlling the drone.
Whether you consider your opponent in a war sub-human or not is completely irrelevant to all the engineering problems you have to solve here.
Reliability is absolutely important, because you want that opposing tank or helicopter or soldier etc to no longer be opposing you. (But, of course, reliability is only one aspect, and engineers make lots and lots of trade-offs.)
What context do you have in mind where you need a robot to shoot people?
I'm sure this can be done. Boss Baby already shows how to accomplish this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxkB20Tpvx0
This should be achievable once hand job robots are widely deployed and proven to be safe. Men are usually sacrificed first and I'm sure there will be volunteers.
Depends on your definition of a 'handjob'.
For some definitions, we already have the capability.
Also keep in mind that for the handjob robot, the user is expected to be cooperating and to be interested in self-preservation.
Small children defy these common sense expectations.
> a baby some robot neglects to prevent from falling off the changing table
that is when we think about 2 handed robots. 6 handed robot can easily have 2-3 hands assigned to tightly keeping the baby. Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans which is really an artificial constraint. After all we aren't building airplanes using birds as the blueprint.
On the similar note - while not about baby, was just rewatching an early Bing Bang Theory season with this episode where Howard "falls right into the mechanical hand"
> Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans which is really an artificial constraint.
YES, and I wish people would stop pretending we've unlocked some new generality by promoting generic humanoid robots over task-specific ones.
You can probably Rube-Goldberg your way to a diaper-changing robotic enclosure with a 3D baby bidet that uses many low-force robot arms to subdue (most) babies, but a humanoid robot is a very a poor substitute for a human here.
Plus, a human can take personal responsibility for the baby's safety, which is not something a robot can ever do, unless we somehow make the robot fear for its life/freedom/employment the same way the overarching social/legal system does for humans who sign contracts or accept highly accountable roles.
won't the baby feel dis-abled by only having two arms?
On the other hand - the baby will from the beginning develop an instinct to keep track of 6 hands flying around instead of just 2. Will help in future street fights :)
In general, looking at the AI coding agents i think we all either already feel or soon will feel disabled. And honestly i think human race with its perception of itself as the "top of the Creation" is due for a modesty lesson to help speed up the evolution. We're spending tremendous resources unproductively, be it wars or just ineffective economies, etc. We don't feel the urge to develop our civilization and to evolve ourselves in all aspects - from mental and biological to cyber-integration. The Mother Nature doesn't like such relaxed species.
Are you suggesting baby exoskeletons?
Why? There's nothing particularly special about this problem. I would bet a year for an alpha version, and production version in 5 years. We are not exactly limited by mechanical engineering here, there's nothing particularly unique about the human hand that can't be replicated. Tele operated surgical robotics have been a thing for decades. Give it a few months for the multimodal robotic VLM/LAMs to catch up. In many ways this particular problem is a lot more well defined than e.g. self driving cars.
> there's nothing particularly unique about the human hand that can't be replicated
Humanity is far from replicating / matching performance of human hand.
We are far from matching the performance of a human hand in general, but for special tasks we can totally match or exceed the performance.
For example, a nutcracker can crack nuts better than my hand. A dishwasher can wash dishes better than my hand.
A special robot might be able to change diapers better than my hand.
The point is that the success rate needs to be 99% and safety needs to be 100%. You're not allowed to take shortcuts. That's what makes it difficult.
Also VLMs/LAMs aren't going to cut it. You're going to need something like TDMPC.
It's good that you make a distinction between success rate and safety rate.
However, safety rate doesn't need to be 100%. If you can keep the failure probability as low as the probability to be hit by a random asteroid falling from the sky, that's good enough.
TDMPC for one of the downstream networks perhaps, but the upstream will have to be some sort of reasoning model if you want it to be general purpose w.r.t. babies.