Recently watched a video on Elon Musk's Optimus Robot. It walks a bit like the older Honda, Asimo robot, a slow, stately, slightly weird motion. I'm old enough to remember hippies of the 1970s who wore earth shoe sandals. I don't know if it was the design of the shoe or the people who wore them but they had a funny, gliding walk. Optimus moves that way.
The most significant item I saw in the video was the humanoid robot folding a shirt. Back when I was teaching, a clothes folding robot was a holy grail. The ones available were big industrial machines with two arms and something like 17 degrees of freedom on each arm. The object was to have the machine autonomously fold clothes from a pile. Even folding a simple towel or washcloth took a good bit of computing power. The bot needs to have a definite visual capability, object recognition (is this the towel or pants or a shirt), enough dexterity in its manipulators to handle the material and the ability to know when it has completed the task and maybe even stack the folded items.
This was more of a software problem than hardware.
Back to Optimus--it was a little too smooth and Musk later admitted it wasn't acting autonomously. It was mimicking a human operator. Still, I can see where that might be useful in dangerous environments.
Boston Dynamics robots are the ones to beat. If you haven't seen the videos of their incredible machines. Take some time and search them out.
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