For a while I was missing the ability one uses all the time in stable diffusion prompts of using parentheses and floats to emphasize weight to different parts of the prompt. The more I thought about how it would work in an LLM though, the more I realized it's just reinventing code syntax and you could just give a code snippet to the LLM prompt.
It would be interesting to first create a taxonomy of juggalo face paint patterns a la aruco markers/April tags, then see if a sufficiently large crowd of juggalos could be used to calibrate cameras
Consider 2 welding systems, a hungover human on a 3 legged ladder with a scratched up welding helmet doing an overhead TIG weld holding the filler rod a foot away from the weld pool, and a 6 DOF Kuka bot doing a weld in the same position on a completely rigid work piece clamped down to a precision machined fixture table which is clamped down to a precision machined floor that the robot is also mounted to.
The human system weighs 250lbs and can be placed anywhere. Let's ask what it takes to walk the factory robot in that direction. First let's have the work piece be moving, let's say on a conveyor belt. The old robotics way of thinking would be to introduce this variable into the programming of the bot/station, create simple sensors for either the work piece or conveyor itself to indicate to the programming loop where the part is with as little error as possible, and continue to keep accuracy while maintaining as much precision as possible using rigidity (which equals mass and space). Now the whole system is functionally 7 DOF, and you add in the error and failure modes of the 7th DOF (the conveyor system) and accumulate some error. Now just imagine instead of a conveyor the part is on a rolling table with random Z height, and so it the robot arm, and you can see this will fall apart, you can't fight this battle with deterministic programming, machining precision, and rigidity. Obviously if you extended this system to be a humanoid robot on a 3 legged ladder which would be 30+ DOF between the weld and the ground, it couldn't possibly work.
But back to the hungover human, why does this system work so well? The human has very good eyes and a very good internal IMU. They are looking at the end of the filler rod and the weld pool, and even though the information isn't that good coming through the scratched welding helmet, they can compensate for all that error and run an internal function that holds the torch and filler rod in the optimum position to do a good TIG weld while ignoring or automatically adjusting for tons of other variables. Now to address your original question, in our system
1. Are current cameras good enough to get an equivalent amount of information about the weld that the hungover welder has? Yes, in fact can get more information than a human can
2. Are IMUs as good as a hungover human has? Hard to really know, but seems like it, though if you need many IMUs attached to different limbs on a robot its probably not as good as humans yet
3. Is the power density of actuators and power storage good enough to approximate this 250lb system of a human on a ladder with some combination of DOF that reaches a sufficient range of motion to emulate the humans hands (whether the robot looks like a human or not?) - yeah, plus in this case the welder is plugged into the ground for the human anyway so that system is already attached to mains power
So given all this, seems like the limiter is just software, which is the bull case for this prospected robotics revolution
Many overactuated, purpose built robots (like surgical robots and pianos) exist, and have existed since the Unimate, and work great in certain situations. The problem with all of them is they are very expensive, often extremely large, and single purpose or very narrow purpose (and even if they are narrowly multipurpose, require tons of setup to get to work for each job they are intended to do).
I personally am not bullish on 1:1 human hands either, but IMO the question shouldn't be $100k 2 ton Kuka arm vs biped with hands, it's overactuated robotics (build it from the floor with hard coded operations) vs underactuated (build it from the contact point of the work backwards with ML and sensors). We shall see which form factors prevail, but the type of robotics development posted here seems like the way forwards regardless, an ecosystem of small, power dense, reliable, accurate QDD actuators will lead to many general purpose robot applications. I recognize I am not using underactuated vs overactuated in their strict definition here but if you are familiar with robots I think you'll understand where I am coming from as far as a robot design ethos.
I will say though in designing robots of this type without necessarily being bound by trying to make a robot look like a human, I have often found myself accidentally recreating human arm DOF in a round trip way, it does just end up being well packaged beyond the "world designed for humans" talking point. Maybe hands will end up being a similar situation.
There was a sharp rise in demand/value since 2020 on cars like the 355 and 550, and some bit rarer but still significant in number cars like the 360 Challenge Stradale and 430 Scuderia. Especially for the 355 and 550, which exist in significant numbers, before 2020 these cars were $70-100k, but now with nice examples going from $150k-225k, it can make a lot more sense to import one from a softer market like Europe or Japan (especially since Japanese market examples are often extremely well kept and LHD), even if the cost of importing is $10-20k.
The ship example maybe wasn't the greatest, in the cases of the Ever Given and MV Aman, the crews were required to stay on the boats as custodians while dealing with these issues, in the latter case a single sailor was on the ship for 4 years, the last 2 alone and without power.
Another interesting case with ships is the Trieste and several other Russian oligarch mega yachts being held in Italy. Italian law requires them to maintain the value of frozen assets, so they are spending millions per month to keep these yachts maintained.
The second case was apalling. No human would inflict such a cruel punishment like a blind bureaucracy can. A similar case is an iranian who was stuck in a French airport for 18 years. Completely pointless.
I was in the same boat as you and sounds like others in this thread, >1000 hours in Blender over the past few years, but learned Fusion360 to be able to get parts lasercut and machined so had to go to proper parametric CAD format. The simple answer is use both - some things like making a simple bracket or fixture are just much easier in CAD. For organic shapes with lots of complexity, sub D modeling is far faster and easier IMO in Blender than the ways to achieve that in CAD (like T splines in Fusion).
The space between those 2 things is where you have to decide what you are really trying to accomplish. The program you use will have an impact on what your result looks like, you see this in the evolution of product design alongside the evolution of design software (boxy cars in the 80s, soap bars in the 90s, and the last few decades of cars with flowing designs with body line defining creases which modern A surface modelers seem to draw you towards). I find parts made in Blender with my workflow often look a lot more interesting and visually pleasing, using edge crease/bevel modifiers and sliding loops around vs. using fillets in CAD for instance, they both aim to soften an edge, but look far different in the end. If you are only ever going to 3D print parts and never CNC, you are already fast in Blender, and part strength vs mass doesn't matter much (especially to a degree where you don't care about FEA), Blender is plenty viable to make printed parts with.
You can footgun yourself easily with both programs, but I find Fusion to be worse for this, half because of the UI, but using tools like sketch projection for me has caused really diabolical issues in the timeline. The whole trick to CAD is being very careful with the design intention as you progress forwards, which is hard to learn coming from 3D modelers where that doesn't matter much and you can just shuffle around non destructive modifiers. This might just be due to my own experience difference in the programs though, I definitely remember going down some roads in Blender I never returned from on meshes when I was learning, normally by either applying subdivision modifiers, doing too many loop cuts, or using a tri/n-gon somewhere thinking it wouldn't be an issue or I would fix it later.
Making a high performance, expensive, rare car is a small part of the recipe. Most Ferrari owners own more than one Ferrari (65% according to Ferrari of North America study from a decade ago or so, not sure if there's an updated number). A significant number of owners own more than 2. Ferrari famously has dealer prioritization and waitlists that reward you for buying more cars, just like Rolex which another poster mentioned below. When I was servicing these cars around 2015, many customers would buy FFs and Californias that they didn't necessarily want just to have the option to buy something like a first year 458 Spider, not even one of the particularly rare offerings. If someone got something truly low production like a LaFerrari or F12 TDF, chances are that customer had already bought 10+ cars from the dealer and immediately trades in many of their cars at a multi hundred thousand dollar loss to them as soon as they are able to get out of a "regular" model into a special edition. Ferrari drives/meets also serve as social clubs/networking which certainly does provide some positive value for many owners of these vehicles. Very few customers I ever met really cared about outright performance/$ and would have been cross shopping a Ford GT with a 430.
Also they are very specific owners. There's one guy here in LA, specifically the San Gabriel Valley neighborhood who realized there were a ton of visitors from mainland China flush with cash who were either coming as tourists or buying property, i.e. the "fuerdai" phenomenon. Cue a few strategically placed watch/jewelry and lambo/ferrari dealerships later, and I think he's one of the top sellers of their cars in North America...
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