Which past robotics prediction aged the worst?

[jonathan.rao1]

@joseph_sing Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit. Most flashy demo reels involve some amount of teleoperation, scripted sequencing, or cherry-picked takes - that's not necessarily dishonest, but it does mean the gap between 'demoed' and 'reliably autonomous in production' is still large. Totally unrelated but has anyone else noticed how fast component costs are dropping this year.

[rao91]

Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: Elder care is one of the most emotionally appealing use cases and also one of the hardest, because it demands both physical safety around fragile people and social/communication skill that's still far behind the manipulation hype.

[benjaminsanchez]

@rao91 Small correction on one detail: The safety case for humanoids working near people usually leans on compliant/backdrivable joints plus soft force limits, but there isn't yet a mature, widely-adopted standard equivalent to what industrial arms have had for decades. A recurring pattern in the field: a capability looks solved in a controlled demo, then takes another 18-24 months of engineering to become boringly reliable in the field.

[jhansen]

Yeah, this tracks with what I've read as well. Most flashy demo reels involve some amount of teleoperation, scripted sequencing, or cherry-picked takes - that's not necessarily dishonest, but it does mean the gap between 'demoed' and 'reliably autonomous in production' is still large.

[jonathan.rao1]

@jhansen Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it: Legs earn their keep specifically where the environment wasn't redesigned for robots - stairs, curbs, uneven yards, cluttered floors - which is a smaller slice of real-world tasks than the marketing suggests.

[jhansen]

@jonathan.rao1 That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit. Automotive plants ended up as the first serious proving ground for humanoids mostly because they already have structured environments, safety processes, and budget for automation - not because car assembly is uniquely suited to bipeds.

[richard36]

Still learning the space, so correct me if wrong - Open-source humanoid projects matter less for out-competing the well-funded players and more for keeping the barrier to entry low enough that new ideas and new people can actually get into the field. 'General purpose' in 2026 mostly means 'can be reprogrammed for a new task without new hardware,' not 'can walk into any environment and figure things out unsupervised.'

[rao91]

@richard36 Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it: The 'humanoid' form factor mostly wins on infrastructure compatibility, not raw efficiency - stairs, doors, and tools were all built for a human body plan, so a legged, two-armed robot slots into existing spaces without retrofitting them.

[ramirez77]

Side note that might be relevant: A genuinely underrated bottleneck is neither hardware nor pure ML - it's the unglamorous integration work of making perception, planning, and control agree with each other reliably for eight-hour shifts. Legs earn their keep specifically where the environment wasn't redesigned for robots - stairs, curbs, uneven yards, cluttered floors - which is a smaller slice of real-world tasks than the marketing suggests.

[jlefebvre]

Ran into exactly this myself. 'General purpose' in 2026 mostly means 'can be reprogrammed for a new task without new hardware,' not 'can walk into any environment and figure things out unsupervised.'