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Comment by schobi | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine situations where I hold something, thinking "this needs to go there". Cleanup, but also moving days, gardening, construction. I like the concept of the "luggage from sapient pearwood" - maybe tell it where to go, drop off something and come back? Put a box on it, and it will carry it down the stairs?

This is not it. Needs to be quiet and energy efficient, but still handle stairs and garden... If I need to follow it, I could just use an exoskeleton - no, please make this autonomous.

If you've solved voice interface, navigation, low power.. Then you almost have a humanoid robot who could also put the laundry in the washing machine, not just next to it.

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> I can imagine situations where I hold something, thinking "this needs to go there".

I'll do you better. Every goddamn day I have situations where I have something in my hands that I would like to let go of and have it stay exactly there. I often dream of a magical solution that would let me create small, temporary flat surfaces out of thin air. I envy the astronauts on the ISS; my life feel like one constant shortage of empty flat surfaces.

Of course, this thing is not that either - maybe it would keep my thing suspended where I want it, but the propellers would blow everything else out of where it is.

> small, temporary flat surfaces out of thin air

Hmmm, short of force-field technology, I think there's a slightly different solution which we might be getting close to: A robot assistant that can recognize when it is offered objects, and then returns them. This role may be familiar to anyone who has ever helped a parent do car/home repairs.

Human: "Take this."

Bot: "This looks new, please name the object."

Human: "It's a sprongle wrench."

Bot: "Taking sprongle wrench."

Human: "Give me the sprongle wrench."

Bot: "Here's the sprongle wrench."

____

Back to your flat-surface scenario, perhaps similar system could create virtual shelves or cubbyholes? When you present the robot an item, it remembers the handoff location in space, and moving your hand there again causes it to offer the corresponding object. You'd probably need some sort of augmented-reality display in order to quickly see what's available though.

> Back to your flat-surface scenario, perhaps similar system could create virtual shelves or cubbyholes? When you present the robot an item, it remembers the handoff location in space, and moving your hand there again causes it to offer the corresponding object.

That's genius, actually! This would solve the problem, as long as the robot is reliably fast and accurate in giving back the right object at the right moment! And as long as it has enough capacity and/or appendages[0].

This reminds me of a related insight that was also enlightening to me when I heard it. It was in one of the SICP lectures, that talked about infinite streams and lazy evaluation[1]. Quoting from the transcript[2], emphasis mine:

"Again, you can ask. Is that data structure integers really all the integers? Or is it is something that's cleverly arranged so that whenever you look for an integer you find it there? That's sort of a philosophical question, right? If something is there whenever you look, is it really there or not? It's sort of the same sense in which the money in your savings account is in the bank."

[0] - In some 5-10% of cases, I don't just want to temporarily let go of the object - I want it positioned in a specific place for a visual reference. Think instruction manual, a recipe sheet, or a tablet screen. Your robot solution could still solve this, with a few dedicated appendages to hold things in place.

[1] - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...

[2] - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...

Stuff doesn’t stay put on the ISS either. Even if you could let go of something with zero velocity relative to yourself, there are air currents to keep the air safely mixed. Astronauts have Velcro to keep stuff in place. Special fireproof Velcro, IIRC.

You're right. But I'd still go far with the ability for things to stay roughly where I let go of them, for about a minute or two.

Velcro is nice too, but it also depends on the microgravity environment - even if I lined every object and every vertical surface I could find with velcro strips, many of the objects would be too heavy to remain in place in 1G.

Maybe the next step is to walk a path with it once and then have it repeat it. I often have groceries delivered that require me to walk a dozen times to my basement to stow it away. If I have to do it once for "teaching" and then repeat it 11 more times, that would be a win.

Also, as a reminder to the "do you even lift, bro" crowd, there is an increasing number of aging people with declining physical strength that could potentially benefit from a product like this. Yes, with current drone technology this is too noisy / turbulent / energy inefficient to be entirely practical, but how many of these limits are due to fundamental physics constraints and how many still have quite a bit of room for expansion?

>how many of these limits are due to fundamental physics constraints

All of them.

Even with a 10x increase in battery energy density, you still need to move the same volume of air to generate enough upward thrust for a given weight.

Yeah, and that’s a very large volume of air for most interesting payloads. You have to move the same mass of air as the vehicle mass plus the payload mass. That’s a lot of air. Running UAVs indoors in a normal sized room quickly starts large air currents that have to be faught by blowing more air…

Yes, that phenomenon is called the vortex ring state and it's a big problem in rotorcraft.

Agree that people could benefit from it. However:

> Also, as a reminder to the "do you even lift, bro" crowd, there is an increasing number of aging people with declining physical strength that could potentially benefit from a product like this.

These people would benefit from lifting too. Physical decline seems inevitable, but its speed seems malleable.

> These people would benefit from lifting too. Physical decline seems inevitable, but its speed seems malleable.

Not for those who're already at the point of needing things like that. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure... except if you're already sick.

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