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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this should be an 'ask HN' thread. About 10 years ago I considered taking up robotics as a hobby, and thought better of it upon asking a robotics professor I did deadlifts with in the gym. My goal was an autonomous robot which could fetch me arbitrary things from a refrigerator with minimal trickery (aka radio tags on beer cans, magnetic tape on the floor, etc). Seemed impossible at the time, or at least a pretty serious Ph.D. thesis type of effort.

Is there some list of 'open problems in robotics' by which I could inform myself if this is still an insane goal?

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That goal has gotten easier in the last 10 years, mainly due to machine learning in the vision system. You can reliably train a neural net to find things in a fridge from a depth camera.

The rest of the problem: navigation, motion planning, etc. hasn't changed that much, but is definitely possible on an amateur budget.

The problem with a list of "open problems in robotics" is that just about everything people have come up with has been demonstrated in a lab somewhere. Walking, grasping, manipulation, navigation, swarming, etc. But nobody has managed to combine all those capabilities in a single robot. So the remaining open problem is to solve all the individual problems with one piece of hardware and software.

Absolutely not an insane goal. If you want to see progress in picking items a good starting point with a bunch of resources is the Amazon picking challenge.

In terms of navigation, magnetic line following is trivial and more complex navigation really isn't that hard these days. Just look at how any of the modern robovacs navigate.

If you want to generally see where things are I'd recommend checking out some papers or even some writeups from the last icra.

EDIT: Just looked at the Amazon picking challenge for the first time in quite a while and it's not as impressive as I remember it to be.

Depending on your definition of trickery, you could probably do it right now with a vending machine fridge and a conveyer belt.

Yeah, when I was originally thinking of this, the conclusion I came to was that this would be a more honest version of the available 'robotics' solutions.

not that hard with some fiducial tags. Here's my (hobbyist) effort that cost a bit more than 1k https://youtu.be/9_9aARNxSuE

Thanks very much for posting that. Looks about what I had in mind (though I have machine tools, so I'm hoping I can make fancier hardware).

It is an open problem still. I'm unsure of a list though.

There have been some great advancements in grasping and embodied decision making lately though, so it could fall soon.

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