The robot’s use is uncertain, but Boston Dynamics, which was bought by Hyundai for$ 1.1 billion in 2021, has the general idea that it is stronger and more trustworthy than a human worker. According to Boston Dynamics spokesman Kerri Neelon,” The machine is going to be able to do things that are challenging for mankind.” ” Like have things that are uncomfortable for people to carry and pick up pretty heavy things.”
Atlas may have friends: 2025 appears to be the year that versatile humanoid robots, which have been generally confined to research labs, start appearing on the market. Some have already begun their first preliminary robot moves into paid work, such as Figure’s titular mammal shipping out to business customers last year and Agility Robotics ‘ Digit moving things in a warehouse.
Tech companies are also joining the fray: It is reported that both Apple and Meta are developing some sort of consumer-facing human machine. By 2035, according to a report from Goldman Sachs in 2024, human-like robots will account for$ 38 billion of the business, more than the company’s projections from the previous year.
Similar to their human counterparts, human computers will be able to switch between multiple jobs. It uses a fundamentally different approach to traditional assembly line technology, which revolves entirely around specific manufacturing tasks. Co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, Jonathan Hurst, says his company expects its robots to work behind and not derail that process.
According to Hurst,” a purpose-built technology solution will always have higher efficiency and lower costs.” If you have 24-hour activities for a particular task, that’s great. A flexible machine might be more effective for things that don’t require constant movement, though.
In a different way, Boston Dynamics puts it. The firm claims Atlas was created with an intention to create a machine that could travel anywhere else because its factories are now designed to house automation. Neelon says,” We live in a human-first world, so we should build a machine that reflects that.”
However, there are obstacles to bringing human robots to business. Tesla’s Optimus has been a lot of hype since the company first revealed it in 2021, but a demonstration in October raised questions about how freely it could be run. Musk stated in January that the company would build” some thousand” computers over the course of 2025, but in April he warned investors that generation might be impacted by China’s restrictions on rare-earth metal imports in response to President Donald Trump’s taxes.
When they are able to transfer expertise on the fly, they are more apt to do so as a human employee. A food or tractor-related shop could have one, according to Hurst, and that robot could be there depalletizing, cleaning, filling shelves, checking inventory, and other tasks. The real benefit is present in that situation.
Additionally, natural language processing’s continued advancements allow robots to get instructions via voice commands. Making it simpler for computers to operate alongside people coworkers could be as easy as a superintendent saying,” Please mop the floor.”
However, there are still health concerns relating to the use of heavy metal robots to work alongside people, and there will be plenty of edge cases to deal with. The main issue, according to Chris Atkeson, a teacher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, may be stability. He used a robot to replenish shelves immediately using the case of a machine. The job may become completed flawlessly for weeks until a failing case develops.
” Imagine the user arrives in a day and finds nothing but the floor and nothing on the shelves. Imagine the location is destroyed, says Atkeson. ” Those are very expensive failures,” the saying goes.
The rapid development of AI versions gives reason to be optimistic, though. Atkeson says,” Never gonna happen,” I would have said,” Never gonna happen,” if you had asked me five years ago. However, we have made significant progress in what I’ll call” common sense” thanks to large language versions. We might be just as close as that.
