I had never heard of Steve Roberts or these amazing bike projects. Reading up through the development of BEHEMOTH put an huge smile on my face, thank you. Such passion!
iRobot got crushed by Chinese competitors. Rethink failed early, they had a poor quality product and Universal made a much better cobot. And this new venture is pointless, there are 10 other companies in the Boston area alone doing warehouse automation...
The comment about humanoid forms raising expectations comes from Rethink's hype and failure.
Rethink tried to solve manipulation and failed.
The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1]
What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3]
I'm a huge fan of the ease of cleaning & repairing iRobots, especially the earlier models. I don't know if the competitors match that but I have preferred their simplicity & quality.
China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.
Upvote for you sir. I was writing the same response as you posted the exact response. The only thing I did not mention that I will add here. iRobot was kind of a turd. They basically kept the same turd of a robot for a decade plus. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…
This is how ship's AI is depicted in The Expanse (TV series) and I think it's really compelling. Quiet and unobtrusive, but Alex can ask the Rocinante to plot a new course or display the tactical situation and it's fast, effective and effortlessly superhuman with no back-talk or unnecessary personality.
Compare another sci-fi depiction taken to the opposite extreme: Sirius Cybernetics products in the Hitchhikers Guide books. "Thank you for making a simple door very happy!"
I may remember wrongly, but I don't believe the expanse was depicting AI. It was more powerful computation and unobtrusive interfaces. There was nothing like Jarvis. Rocinante was a war vessel and all its feature was tailored to that. I believe even the mechanical suits of the Martians were very manual (no cortana a la Master Chief).
I think this idea that we need more people is completely bonkers. Look at the housing market in any developed country; overcrowding at tourist destinations around the world; environmental impact of resource extraction, plastics manufacturing, fossil fuel consumption. There are WAY TOO MANY people in the world already. We had thriving communities with <1B people on the planet, we certainly don't need to go rocketing past 10B.
https://bikepacking.com/plog/steve-roberts-computing-across-...
More details, from the man himself:
https://microship.com/winnebiko-ii/
https://microship.com/bicycle-mobile-packeteering/
https://microship.com/first-text-while-driving/
https://microship.com/behemoth/
I think the craziest thing is that almost every feature he built into BEHEMOTH is now covered by the average smartphone (+ a small solar panel).