Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from which someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau where they run some simple calculations. Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.
I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software.
The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact.
A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time).
A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams.
I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep.
I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing what it was. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).
I've seen worse. For 2 years I received the results weekly, that I didn't ask for, of a $1m a year burn reporting stack. This was launched during a massive back patting ceremony like something out of Severance.
So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it.
And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
It's always funny when HN users comment that there are no more opportunities for startups and it's too hard to compete against large, wealthy corporations. The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.
I have seen this way to often in other areas. That is the push here as well AI can sort through it. Too many people are held to account for not meeting what amounts to made up numbers.
I agree and it's quite resilient to digital outages/downtime (at least in terms of hours, probably not more than a few days) so your manufacturing productivity won't drop to zero when the ERP system goes down. The paper logs can also be entered later when the system comes back up.
As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
Not sure this counts as "humanoid" any more than the robots we've had in factories for a century... the hands and feet are nothing like a human's, and would not be improved by being more human.
It seems they just made the shape of their machine have a vaguely human silhouette so they could ride a hype wave.
I'm all for programmable humanoid robots, humans are an awesome human interface, but this ain't it.
Looks like they already have been testing it in the Spartanburg, SC, USA plant (just outside of Greenville SC [also I think the largest BMW factory in the world making most of their SUVs]). Still I don't get why a humanoid robot would be a thing for car making, a robot arm seems like it'd almost always be more efficient.
My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.
90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.
You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
Cars are in the intersection where you have large parts that need to be moved around where other things happen with them and large scale of standard designs that is worth automating.
I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.
I agree and for me personally this is very easy to see and understand.
Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.
I don't disagree with the general utility of humanoid (or other multipurpose) robots, just not in a factory setting.
I think automating stuff in the factory makes zero sense - its a controlled environment with purpose designed tooling where anything that makes sense to automate has been automated. All the extra work will only result in marginal gains.
It's automating the stuff that goes on outside of the factories - for example construction imo is about almost as labor intensive as it was a century ago, the marginal gains were offset by more complex building techniques and higher expectations.
Housing is also just about the most valuable thing that exists in every country.
Because so much infrastructure is in humanoid form. If you can make something that can manipulate two hands on arms that are positioned and moved like human arms, you could just put that torso into a lot of situations to replace a human without a lot of retooling. That's the dream I think.
Installing humanoid robots in a factory is like using regexes to parse data.
It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.
Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.
Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.
Vertically upright humanoids have a lot going for them: they don't occupy a lot of floor space, they can pull an object right into their center of gravity to manipulate it, and because they're familiar they're relatively easy to prototype actions for because they're our actions.
People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.
Hexagon is very prominent in precision manufacturing through their dimensional measurement robots (CMM Coordinate Measurement Machine) and other metrology software/hardware. This is most likely why they were chosen by BMW, as I imagine they already have a working relationship together, although the EU aspect could have contributed as well.
I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.
Seems so funny to me that we are building llms to write in english code for computers. And building robots to perform some automated processes in the shape of humans.
When are we going to rip the bandaid off, and skip bothering with the ux layer built for humans? I guess that is just old fashioned 20th century factory style automation that doesn't get headlines written about it, at least not in these decades.
It is a pilot project. German pilot projects rarely go anywhere. If this succeeds against all odds, I hope for BMW that the robots are buying cars, too.
Not if they trained on driver data. Will come with tailgating, lane swerving and flashing high beams as standard. Sonar will be used to judge the minimum distance you can ram behind someone and when to activate high beams.
Yeah. Feels kind of insignificant considering the amount of non-humanoid robots they've used on production lines for the last few decades and lack of any claims to be "fully autonomous" or for the humanoid robots to be performing particularly advanced tasks
This doesn't feel like it needs to be humanoid shaped. It does not appear ambulatory. Why not just tracked chassis with some robot arms. That said, humanoid robots with food tracks very anime.
Tesla beat Hyundai and BMW to this meaningless announcement a year ago, and have already progressed from that to the inevitable “oh yeah, this doesn’t actually work yet.”
I think this is going to be bad for BMW, and bad for the current robotics-summer. I _hope_ that’s not the case, I’d love for robotics to get deployed more widely in manufacturing. But I’m pretty sure it will be. I think the chances of meaningful success would be higher with non-humanoid robotics
Robots are widely deployed in manufacturing, just not humanoid robots. The biggest benefit of stationary robots is that their behavior is 100% predictable and they are always where the humans expect them to be. There are certain areas in factories which can be nearly 100% automated (pick & pull in warehouses, for example), but there are a lot of areas where, without a human in the loop, there are too many edge cases to reasonably expect humanoid-robots-as-replacements-for-humans to anticipate or react to.
(I have 15 years experience in high tech manufacturing, with most of that building test automation & manufacturing execution systems, and an advanced degree in operations research.)
Feel free to ask for more details if you have specific questions! I worked in robotics for many years, I have some decent familiarity with this space. Here’s some more detailed thoughts “for free”:
Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.
It would be hard to believe that BMW doesn't have many industrial robots already deployed and in fact they do on a serious scale [1]. Now, to my mind, adding humanoid-robots to the existing mix of standard-robots and people seems not completely terrible.
The article's vacuous AI gloss language indeed makes it seem like they are indeed engaging in, crudely put, baloney. But your own language is weird here, like you don't realize robots are a standard thing in modern manufacturing. I mean, modern manufacturing "succeeds" massively using nonhumanoid robots at large scale.
Oh, absolutely. Because history clearly shows that when multi-billion dollar corporations save money on labor, they immediately pass those savings directly to the consumer.
I think this is a myth - Chinese factories don't seem to be automated to a higher degree than European ones, and in any case are still full of Kuka, Fanuc and ABB robots.
I think there's a domestic brand or two that's gaining marketshare, but they're not there yet.
There's a myth of Chinese high-tech (esp in cars), that is not to say their stuff isn't technologically advanced, but the characterization that Chinese tech has left Europeans' behind just does not pass muster when one looks at mechanic videos of Chinese EVs.
Their cars look fancy and are full of futuristic screens and sensors, but the suspension setup and lot of engineering behind them is not exactly cutting edge.
That's why a lot of car reviewers say that a lot of their EVs don't drive particularly well
This take might have been true years ago, especially for cheaper makes, but modern EVs from china use high-quality components and designs that often surpass european automakers. The premium brands - Nio, Zeekr, Polestar, Lotus, etc - have design and R&D offices in Europe, and source parts from suppliers all over the world. Nio uses Nvidia Orin chips, Qualcomm SoCs, Brembo brakes, Bosch controllers, ZF suspension systems, Continental/Pirelli tires, and ClearMotion (in their flagship model); can't get any better than that.
The driving feel is definitely a thing, the chinese cars are very soft and 'boaty' which is not as desirable elsewhere. They are also on average much larger and heavier than their western counterparts, cities in China have road infrastructure built in the past 20-30 years with spacious lanes.
I wish I was making this stuff up.
The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact.
A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time).
A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams.
I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep.
I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing what it was. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).
I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.
So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it.
And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.
As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany.
It seems they just made the shape of their machine have a vaguely human silhouette so they could ride a hype wave.
I'm all for programmable humanoid robots, humans are an awesome human interface, but this ain't it.
https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.
You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.
In this video you see the unnecessary robot arm move the pizza to the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN45bTsBUW8
For contrast a How it is Made video of frozen pizzas being created at dozens (hundreds?) per minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrSIOtv8a0
Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.
I think automating stuff in the factory makes zero sense - its a controlled environment with purpose designed tooling where anything that makes sense to automate has been automated. All the extra work will only result in marginal gains.
It's automating the stuff that goes on outside of the factories - for example construction imo is about almost as labor intensive as it was a century ago, the marginal gains were offset by more complex building techniques and higher expectations.
Housing is also just about the most valuable thing that exists in every country.
It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.
Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.
Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.
Does the computer 'memory' behave identically like human memory? Of course not. Does it look like the 'memory' of a human? Again, of course not.
People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.
I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.
When are we going to rip the bandaid off, and skip bothering with the ux layer built for humans? I guess that is just old fashioned 20th century factory style automation that doesn't get headlines written about it, at least not in these decades.
Give Hyundai and BMW time.
(I have 15 years experience in high tech manufacturing, with most of that building test automation & manufacturing execution systems, and an advanced degree in operations research.)
Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.
There are many good practitioners that write about these and other limitations, I think Rodney Brooks has some good discussion of it, eg. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
The mechanism humans use to stay upright after an unexpected loss of balance, flailing etc., would not be safe to be around when a robot employs them.
The article's vacuous AI gloss language indeed makes it seem like they are indeed engaging in, crudely put, baloney. But your own language is weird here, like you don't realize robots are a standard thing in modern manufacturing. I mean, modern manufacturing "succeeds" massively using nonhumanoid robots at large scale.
[1] https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en/our-plant.html
I think there's a domestic brand or two that's gaining marketshare, but they're not there yet.
There's a myth of Chinese high-tech (esp in cars), that is not to say their stuff isn't technologically advanced, but the characterization that Chinese tech has left Europeans' behind just does not pass muster when one looks at mechanic videos of Chinese EVs.
Their cars look fancy and are full of futuristic screens and sensors, but the suspension setup and lot of engineering behind them is not exactly cutting edge.
That's why a lot of car reviewers say that a lot of their EVs don't drive particularly well
The driving feel is definitely a thing, the chinese cars are very soft and 'boaty' which is not as desirable elsewhere. They are also on average much larger and heavier than their western counterparts, cities in China have road infrastructure built in the past 20-30 years with spacious lanes.
The owner family did the right thing at the right time. If the Europe and US business tanks they will be fine. BMW as a brand not necessarily.