Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has issued a wake-up call for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups. He believes they are wasting their money. Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of the approach used by companies like Tesla and Figure. These companies are trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans performing tasks. Brooks calls this method pure fantasy thinking.
He explains that the problem lies in the complexity of the human hand. Our hands contain about 17,000 specialized touch receptors, a level of sophistication that no robot can currently match. While machine learning has led to breakthroughs in speech recognition and image processing, those successes built upon decades of technology designed to capture the right data. Brooks points out that we lack a similar tradition for collecting touch data.
Safety presents another major challenge. Full-sized walking humanoid robots require massive amounts of energy to remain upright. When they fall, they become dangerous objects. The laws of physics mean that a robot twice the size of today’s models would contain eight times the harmful energy.
Looking to the future, Brooks predicts that successful robots in fifteen years will not look like humans at all. He believes they will have wheels, multiple arms, and specialized sensors, completely abandoning the human form. For now, he is convinced that the billions being invested are merely funding expensive training experiments that will never scale to mass production.