Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: youโre wasting your money.
Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and Figure trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. In a new essay, he calls this approach โpure fantasy thinking.โ
The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 specialized touch receptors that no robot comes close to matching. While machine learning transformed speech recognition and image processing, those breakthroughs built on decades of existing technology for capturing the right data. โWe donโt have such a tradition for touch data,โ Brooks points out.
Then thereโs safety. Full-sized walking humanoid robots pump massive amounts of energy into staying upright. When they fall, theyโre dangerous. Physics means a robot twice the size of todayโs models would pack eight times the harmful energy.
Brooks predicts that in 15 years, successful โhumanoidโ robots will actually have wheels, multiple arms, and specialized sensors and abandon the human form. Meanwhile, heโs thoroughly convinced that todayโs billions are funding expensive training experiments that will never scale to mass production.
