The Fastest Growing Robotics Trends of 2024

this video is brought to you by brilliant the year is 2034 you're catching up with an old friend and he tells you that it's just got one of those new humanoid robots he's always been a bit of a weird guy so you don't think much of it and quickly forget the next week you're walking through Walmart and suddenly there it is standing at a stall in the electronic section it's smaller than you thought it would be but $40,000 sure with inflation these days it looks expensive but you do think to yourself well a cheeseburger is $50 these days I remember back in the days when it was just $5 he stopped daydreaming and noticed the smaller print on the price tag awesome there's a 4-year lease option for $320 a month ah what the heck I'm sure I could make that you think to yourself he signed the lease bring the little guy home and boot him up and with a Chim he greets you in the friendliest of ways you thought a little robot in your house would be creepy but seeing it in person well it's actually kind of cool at this point you realize that the Future Has Arrived but this is digit a robot it's maker say is ready to do what human warehouse workers do meet Apollo your new robot coworker he's designed to work alongside humans in a factory and help alleviate taxing and physical labor these missions possible NASA is developing Advanced robotic capabilities to survey deep space and planetary surfaces and to map the way for future human exploration in case you haven't noticed in recent years the field of Robotics is having a bit of a moment even just a few years ago the majority of humanoid robots were clunky and awkward today robotics companies are popping up left and right with products that have refined movements and much greater flexibility in their abilities so we have to ask what's changed between then and now and are humanoid robots another tech fed and a cash grab or will humanoid robots beon place 10 years in the future so let's answer those questions and also Dive Right In and take a look at some of the best robots available today you are watching cold fusion [Music] TV one joh of robots if you want to call it that tends to go down the realism route as interesting as it is I think the more realistic a robot is the more it's going to freak people out but regardless the Chinese firm X robots is giving it a good go X robots went viral after their appearance at the 2023 world robot conference founded in the early 2010s the company specializes in humanoid lifelike robots for research development manufacture sales and service this is an example of one of their more advanced robots working in a restaurant and as you can see the movement still needs some work work but it's functional possesses amazing computer vision plus the realism is better than anything else I've ever seen actually I'm just kidding that's actually a human pretending to be a robot but if you did think that was real for a second after seeing X robots then maybe the lines between human and humanoid are starting to blur even at this extremely primitive stage in the Technology's development but in summary these robots are not particularly practical but they do look cool these can be classed just as entertainment robots but this this next one is way more than that in 2023 the Canadian robotics company Sanctuary AI launched Phoenix a general purpose robot the emphasis for the robot is doing physical work just like a person would at the moment it's smart enough to distinguish different groups of Cups and dextrous enough to sort them by type it can slowly put balls into a jar and also put colored balls into a Ziploc bag it can even make a turkey sandwich and also sort simple Automotive Parts in May of 2024 they announced a collaboration with Microsoft and this was for the development of AI models for the general purpose humanoid robots the unitri G1 unitri another Chinese company has the G1 model as their Flagship robot it features Advanced Mobility stability and AI capabilities its aim is to be used in the home and it starts at $116,000 as you can see it's pretty flexible and weighs only 35 kilos making it one of the lightest robots out there it can do back flips and set the record for the fastest humanoid robot all right so who cares you might be thinking what does this thing actually do well it can apparently use hammers open bottles do basic soldering extremely basic cooking or at least cos play as [Music] such who knows if it's going to be as good as advertised but it's very interesting nonetheless astrobot surprised the industry when it was unveiled in May of 2024 if the demos are in fact as it seems this could be one of the most impressive robots out there it can perform rapid dextrous tasks like cup stacking cleaning up a simple but messy table peeling vegetables using a hammer watering a plant with a spray bottle pouring [Music] wine opening a lided bottle and more interestingly Stardust the makers of astrobot specifically state that in these demos it's not being operated by a human the robot's intelligence is from neural networks there's a the funny twist here though the makers of astrobot claim that it's Tesla who's faking their demos they say that Tesla is secretly using a human to operate their robots during demos and the human is just out of the camera's view speaking of the Tesla Optimus bot let's take a look at what's been going on with it since its announcement in 2021 we've seen some clips of the Tesla bot carrying out various tasks and just this month a new video was released it was the robot in the factory doing some basic tasks such as sorting batteries Tesla and engineer Milan kovak states that they've used neural networks to train the robot to do useful things only using vision from its cameras he states that the robot is still very slow but more successful at completing tasks and can now walk without falling over if all of this is true that's some pretty Swift progress but the jury is still out on if the previous demo was faked next we have mbot it's an AI driven robot that provides personal guidance tutoring and career advice earlier this year mbot offers interactive the parent company unveiled their prototype robot it's hum sized and is being dubbed as the quote personalized AI robot you can mentor end quote judging by the demos it seems a little less baked than some of the other entries in this episode demos of menty showcase a different approach to most humanoid robots out there they focus on presumably domestic cases the robot weighs 70 kilos and can balance itself while carrying objects pretty well a prototype will be unveiled in 2025 the company behind mot funnily enough called ment robotics says this is just the starting point for general purpose bipedal robots in the future they're working towards a robot that has the brain to do all sorts of household chores and learn from us so it can do things it wasn't specifically trained to do next we move into the world of Cheaper consumer robots first we have the emo robot the way I'd sum it up is it's like a '90s electronic toy for adults of course it runs on neural networks but also has neural Hardware and it can respond to a wide array of language navigate its surroundings recognize your voice understand commands and it develops a little bit of an attitude and personality for many having a camera and microphone in your personal space would cause some paes but some people just find it too cute and besides and some would argue that smartphones have the same drawbacks anyway emo is truly an incredible advancement in AI companion robots he has a neural network processor that allows him to recognize faces objects and voices in real time when I pet his head he makes happy little sounds watch when I shake him what about a robot that can mow your lawn one neat feature some of these have is a skid plate on the bottom this helps protect the mower as well as anything it might happen to run over for example if there's a bunch of sticks in the yard it can just run over them and not Chop them all to pieces like a conventional mower I I can see why people want to cut their own Lawns as a form of relaxation but I'd rather do other things with my free time and let the lawn cut itself if you've gone to a restaurant recently you've probably seen these restaurant robots they assist in dishing out orders and they're kind of a commonplace thing nowadays I just think the rapid rate of adoption of these was pretty fascinating I remember them popping up a few years ago and it was a bit of a spectacle but now as these little guys trundle around carrying food no one bets an eyelid anymore and this next one is probably the craziest consumer robot of all it's an irresponsible flame-throwing robot and it's available for anyone to just buy not sure how this is legal but it's out there Disney is also getting involved they've got some new robotics entries and they're using their typical expertise in animation and putting it to good use for the robot's motion you've probably all heard of and seen Sophia this robot is pretty old but seems to have stolen the headlines over the years technically doesn't do much so I'm not really sure why that is it's a bit of a nothing Burger in my opinion but this video wouldn't be complete without mentioning it there's also been developments in robot Builders the quality of the construction remains to be seen but it's still an interesting development nonetheless this may seem like an ordinary house in a normal looking neighborhood but it's not because it was built by a great big robot automating those repetitive and timec consuming tasks like brick laying using robot several firms have now figured out how to do this with their own unique Tech but this bit of Kit from Australia is truly something else it built the walls of a three-bedroom home in under 4 days and real people have bought it with real money and are about to move [Music] in okay so I've taken a look at the latest robots out there but why is this all coming at once well as you might have guessed it's to do with AI improved computer vision has made it possible for robots to navigate ever more complex environments travel across uneven surfaces and even manipulate objects with the old ways of hard coding these were actions that were next to impossible to do in a general way if something in the environment changed the robot would just become confused this still does happen but far less often today modern robots can dynamically adjust for example if a misstep occurs the robot can steady itself well at least most of the time and next are the break throughs in Battery Technology a lot of people think batteries haven't moved an inch but that's not exactly true thanks to the engineering advancements due to electric vehicle demand and the adoption rate over the past decade batteries have gotten just power dense enough to become feasible in robotic applications but still Robot Operating times are measured in hours so there's still a long way to go before we have all day robots and finally we have the cost of components coming down in 2022 a basic humanoid robot would cost around $50,000 to build last year the number dropped to $30,000 but of course there's higher end models that can cost upwards of $150,000 to commission but in all of this we still don't really know how reliable these machines will be when they're put into a work environment or a home will there be another wave of disappointment as they don't do nearly as much as promised only time will tell a few of you may remember the infamous DARPA robotics challenge back in 2013 the pentagon's defense Advanced research projects agency wanted to see the best robots the world had to offer over 30 teams from countries such as Germany Japan the US and Hong Kong traveled to Florida to give their best the goal was to create robots that could perform tasks routinely done by humans that is using power tools opening doors driving golf carts that kind of thing but what ended up happening was pretty much viral videos of robots falling over in spectacular fashion I remember when I was doing my engineering degree at University we did a similar but much simpler challenge with a goal was to build a contraption that could transfer a bag of rice between two uneven platforms within a set of rules and even that was hard so I couldn't imagine how taxing this must have been out of the Dara challenge came the seeds of the success we see today players like Boston Dynamics the CTO of figure Ai and the co-founder of agility robotics were all participants in the challenge Jerry Pratt whose team came second in the Dara challenge is now the CTO of figure a i and he states that if they were to run the same course today what took 50 minutes would now take 12. 5 minutes so of course comparing now and then is like night and day but how much further will we go experts disagree according to Global newswire the humanoid robotics Market will go from $1. 6 billion in 2022 to a staggering 214 billion by 2032 Global X ETFs estimates 4.

8 trillion by 2035 Goldman Sachs is a lot less bullish but still predict a $ 38 billion Market by 2035 I'd say 38 billion sounds way more grounded in reality than 4. 8 trillion but hey nobody can tell how it's really going to go in these early stages according to Wed the main sources of growth will come from demand in sectors such as personal assistance entertainment education and Healthcare I'd add warehouse work and Manufacturing to the list as we've seen companies such as BMW Mercedes and Amazon take a serious look at deploying humanoid robots now the future predictions on robotics vary wildly but we can say for sure that they will find their place in society to what degree remains to be seen Trends such as advancements in computer reasoning computer vision and off-the-shelf humanoid robot software systems by companies such as envidia and open AI would only increase the likelihood of adoption a think invidious trick of training robots in a virtual space and in a way broadcasting that knowledge to all the other robots in their system is a clever and efficient way to go further to this we have wage inflation and aging populations worldwide love it or probably hate it when Advanced enough corporations will skimp out on paying workers and will be looking towards robots as the newest form of cheap labor Figure 1 Apollo and digit are all companies that are eyeing Warehouse applications with BMW Mercedes and Amazon respectively but maybe just maybe everyone is jumping the gun here and when these robots are launched into the workforce and don't perform nearly as well as advertised and it turns out that true humanoid experience is more like 50 years away it could just mean that all this messing around is just for us to realize that humanoid robots aren't the best for most industrial applications but there is a slight possibility that in 10 years domestic home robots are no longer the stuff of Science Fiction maybe robots would entertain us mow our Lawns and build our houses at that point seeing a robot in your local department store like at the beginning of this episode wouldn't seem so weird after all who knows what the future will bring but what do you guys think it's fascinating to think about how fast things are moving we've seen that neural networks have really supercharged the world of Robotics but have you ever wondered how they really work well fortunately there's a fun and easy way to learn about it with brilliant. org brilliant is where you can learn by doing with thousands of interactive lessons in maths data analytics programming and of course AI the course on neural networks is especially relevant for today's topic each lesson on brilliant allows you to play with Concepts a method proven to be six times more effective than than just watching lecture videos all the content on brilliant is crafted by teachers researchers and professionals from MIT Caltech Duke Microsoft Google and more learn at your own pace to brush up on a project for work or just for your own self-improvement you can try everything that brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.