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Comment by comandillos | Hacker News Reader

I am very new to robots and recently decided to go crazy and buy a humanoid from Unitree. I've spent a while building some tools in order to integrate LLMs with vision capabilities that can control the robot motion in a simple manner... and while I saw Opus and Astra crashing against tables, beds and surfaces (yeah, my LIDAR data isn't being used yet), Argon 4 takes a lot of precautions to avoid crashing against walls and other objects! I told my robot to go to a table, and the guy started walking slowly to the table, started steering at it and described the objects in it. Pretty scary for being something I've vibecoded in a matter of hours at home...

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Being new to a hobby and spending 30k on a robot is crazy, props to your wealth.

There are a lot of guys with garages that have a $40k CNC mill in it. If you've got the money -- and in America, a LOT of people have the money -- $30k to be able to experiment with a fairly open platform that may play, as a category, a pivotable role in humanity for the next 15+ years is not very crazy.

New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

> New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

In the US, certain purchase categories make taking on debt to cover upfront costs trivially easy. Open robotics platforms are not one of those categories, while automobiles are.

Automobiles as a whole, yes. Spending $30k+ more than you needed to for a luxury or big honker, no.

Cars are different because there's an industry that provides financing and leasing options to make it very easy to spend beyond your means

It's a misallocation of resources. Actual roboticists can go their entire careers without touching hardware like that, and if they want it they have to spend years writing grants to get ONE to split between three other researchers and a dozen grad students.

Meanwhile a guy who made a fortune in tech optimizing ad placements (not saying that's OP) can pick one up on a lark, and as you said it usually ends up in the garage next to other expensive toys like an $80k truck or autonomous Tesla. Also the $80k trucks are a great example because they're more of a status symbol, just like the robots will be.

I still don’t understand why ads are so profitable. Seems to be one of the few real business models

Of course they used go their whole careers without seeing these robots, they've only been around for three years and used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These days, $30k is cheap enough for a university lab and so a lot of them have picked up these models.

I'd love to play with this but something freaks me out: we heard no later than yesterday hackers ruining tens of millions of food by heating connected fridges in supermarket in France.

What happens when people decide to hack the Unitree robots and have them pick up knives and stab their owner and then go on a spree in the street?

Before people say: "But that's never going to happen, nobody would ever do that!" I'd like to state again the fact that people did just remotely hack fridges to ruin food.

"But ruining food for everybody is nothing, it's just kids playing around, people would never hack robots to hurt other humans!".

Is that what people really think?

Or do they think that "this time programmers managed to create secure software that cannot be hacked into"?

Hacking into what exactly? It's entirely up to the user if they want to connect their robot to an insecure webserver control hub.

The difference between you and most professionals is that we don't play. Groceries weren't playing with their refrigerators, they were attacked, the government can find and punish or kill the criminals if they continue their pattern of failure to bring justice the world will move past them.

Do you think the R1 you got can actually be taught to clean dishes and put them in a dishwasher in their specific sections? I see it doing so in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1JIyXM5qGw

The one in that video is the G1, which is a bit taller and comes with more sensors, but there's a trick and it is the dexterous hands, which can easily cost 10k each.

Based on my very limited knowledge... if you would have dexterous hands with sensitivity on them you could theoretically train a VLA model to do that task, planned by a high-level model like Argon 4, that orchestrates everything. That would as well require in first place a VLA that has similar tasks in its training set and fine-tune it by means of recording hundreds of examples performing teleoperation of the robot hand and arms movements.

Not easy, but definitely getting more and more doable these days.

PS: Didn't spend 20k on hands for my 6k robot, but can confirm it has the cable harness to support them :D

I'd like to do this too.

What's the latency like? Is the llm used to create an instruction set for the robot? How is it interrupted for reflex actions like controlling stumbling?

The LLM right now tells a much lower level neural network controlling the legs, arms and head what and how to move at a ~ 500Hz freq, which controls thing like the stumbling. All motor joints and IMU inputs are given to an ONNX-based RL-trained NN which then outputs motor movements (scary since its works well for the scenarios where its has been trained, but it goes in unexpected ways for untrained scenarios).

In any case latency is acceptable for navigation I guess, but avoiding moving obstacles is definitely a no-go right now.

How much was it?

Around 5.9k euros in Germany for the R1 Pro.

It's 1.23 and weights ~30kg. Even though only the R1 Edu can be in theory programmed, it can be easily modded to enable SSH and root access to deploy custom movement policies and interact with the different on-board daemons to control the movements, grab the video data, etc.

I bought a second-hand Intel DeepSense camera and plugged it on one of the spare USB ports available in the main board to have 3D sensing (even though I really need to play a bit more with it). Right now I am playing with MuJoCo for RL training of new policies, integration with VLAs like NVIDIA Isaac GR00T and integration with LLMs.

I have to say its being a wild ride, and despite the small size of the robot, I have already injured myself with it when playing with the walking policies (If you activate a policy while its hanging, it starts literally kicking and punching you...) I cannot image those owning with the bigger brother of it, the G1...

Thank you, that’s insanely cheap. I might consider getting one.

As a tip from an owner... if you are planning to play around, maybe even the robot dog (Go2) can be a good start and comes with a LIDAR preinstalled. When humanoid robots enter into zero-torque / damping mode, it's 30 kg falling to the floor. I know it might sound stupid, but I didn't realize how heavy and scary this is, at least for me, once you have it in front of you.

Put stones into a desktop PC until it weighs 30kg and drop it from 1.20 m height while its running, onto your parquet, a couple times, I guess, to know if you and whoever lives with or below you is up to robotics testing?

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