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Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

The battery life is abysmal. These machines use the same batteries as every other piece of contemporary tech.

Spot can walk about for 90 minutes top and the more it needs to do (e.g. running additional sensors, performing autonomous functions, etc.), the shorter its battery life will be (I'd guess around an hour is more realistic).

Bipedal prototypes like Atlas wouldn't last that long. Think 20 minutes or so for a heavy robot like that.

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Robots who could replace some manual labour work within a specified area (say: factories), don't need to rely on batteries. We could attach them with a huge wire and plug it into power supply.

In those specified areas it's also much simpler and more efficient to change the process itself.

Automated warehouses for example don't use legged robots that climb ladders, operate forklifts, and carry boxes around.

Interestingly, the bits of manual labour still required in these areas (e.g. factories) are cheap in terms of manual labour and not doable with the same level of efficiency with even the most sophisticated robots, let alone bipedal ones (you'd change the factory to accommodate to the simplest possible robot design, not vice versa).

Then all you need is a centralized "depot" where all of the Spots can come back to and have their batteries swapped out by another robot.

But why even? What would be a realistic use case for such scenario that wouldn't be simpler, cheaper, and more reliably served by more conventional means?

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