Robotics

I've seen a lot of people argue that humanoid robots are a form of skeuomorphism because there are much better form factors, even for homes (e.g. wheel base with arms, robot dog with an arm as the head).

I watched an interview where the roboticist Eric Jang shared his take on this. He believes that the humanoid form factor for an environment like a home is not just sufficient but actually necessary. And he went into concrete reasons why he thinks so, which was super interesting.

If anyone wants to watch it, the discussion about this starts at 21:55 in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHsWJ_XNEz0&t=1395s

I'd add some quotes from the interview here but I'll cast hem in the comments. Reaching the character limit.

"You can come up with a dozen or so very common household scenarios where you want to pick up something that's at a distance and you need to get around some obstacle. The human form is very ideal because it's very easily configurable. You can have a wide stance, which basically gives you a very wide support region with which you can move around and not fall over. But if needed, you can also shrink your footprint so that you can step over a very crowded living room full of children's toys or something."

"The home has a lot of cases where you want to reach pretty far, let's say reach across a dining room table to pick something up, reach under a table [...]. In these spaces, it's very hard to come up with a robot form factor that can reach a long distance and pick up a fairly heavy object without either bracing itself on the countertop or moving its center of mass to be closer to the object you're picking up."

Software engineer @ pinata.cloud. Interested in web3 and games

Interesting point actually.
Is it because a robot dog with an arm as a head is uncannier than a humanoid?

Also, even if not optimal, I wouldn't like to see a dog with an arm as a head in my house 🤣🤣