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

downrightmike

How they work? Without indication

givemeethekeys

That's excellent! I look forward to much cheaper cars now that the robots will be making them for the masses.

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.

amelius

Meanwhile China has dark factories.

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

r33b33

So their cars will get cheaper, right... right???

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.

javiramos

According to Figure, their robots had already been deployed in production

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).

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.

dmix

Seems to be this European robotics company https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...

numpad0

Why doesn't anybody do the shoulder complex right? It gives me itches to scratch.

okokwhatever

And this is how it starts in EU

maxglute

This doesn't feel like it needs to be humanoid shaped. It does not appear ambulatory. Why not just tracked chassis with some robot arms. That said, humanoid robots with food tracks very anime.

drnick1

Looking forward to using one of those robots as a butler.

asdff

Seems so funny to me that we are building llms to write in english code for computers. And building robots to perform some automated processes in the shape of humans. When are we going to rip the bandaid off, and skip bothering with the ux layer built for humans? I guess that is just old fashioned 20th century factory style automation that doesn't get headlines written about it, at least not in these decades.

cuvinny

Looks like they already have been testing it in the Spartanburg, SC, USA plant (just outside of Greenville SC [also I think the largest BMW factory in the world making most of their SUVs]). Still I don't get why a humanoid robot would be a thing for car making, a robot arm seems like it'd almost always be more efficient.

avaer

Not sure this counts as "humanoid" any more than the robots we've had in factories for a century... the hands and feet are nothing like a human's, and would not be improved by being more human. It seems they just made the shape of their machine have a vaguely human silhouette so they could ride a hype wave. I'm all for programmable humanoid robots, humans are an awesome human interface, but this ain't it.

excalibur

The robots featured in the embedded promotional video appear to be mostly useless. This is the opposite of impressive.