Amed Roboticist Says Humanoid Robot Bubble Is Doomed to Burst

Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a warning for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: You’re wasting your money.

Brooks predicts that in 15 years, successful “humanoid” robots will in fact roll on wheels, wield multiple arms, and use specialized sensors — abandoning the human form. (Photo: Christopher Michel Wikimedia Commons)

Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and longtime MIT professor, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and Figure that aim to train robots in dexterity by showing them videos of humans performing tasks. In a new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking,” Connie Loizos reported for TechCrunch.

The problem, he says, is that human hands are extraordinarily complex, with about 17,000 touch receptors no robot can yet match.

Machine learning made strides in speech recognition and vision only after decades of progress in data capture. “We don’t have such a tradition for touch data,” Brooks points out.

Safety is another hurdle: full-sized humanoid robots expend massive energy simply staying upright, making falls dangerous. Physics means a robot twice the size of today’s models carries eight times the harmful energy.

Brooks predicts that in 15 years, successful “humanoid” robots will in fact roll on wheels, wield multiple arms, and use specialized sensors — abandoning the human form.

For now, he says billions are being wasted on “expensive training experiments that will never scale to mass production.”