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points by tristanj 1 day ago | 0 comments

I believe this conclusion is flawed. The author argues:

1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.

2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.

3) Labor costs are higher in America.

4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.

5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.

Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.

I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:

1) Labor is still relatively cheap.

2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.

3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.

4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.

5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only sold 5,500 robots last year. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.

The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.

When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software side is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.

[–] Animats 1 day ago

Yes, the article doesn't really tell us much.

Motor winding is an amusing problem. Everybody making motors has a powered winder. It's handling the wire ends that can be either manual or automatic. If you look at videos of winders, automating the wire end handling is most of the machinery.

Here's an overview of winding automation:

Full auto, robotic transfer.[1]

Full auto, manual transfer [2].

Semi auto. [3].

Manual, powered. [4]

Manual, unpowered motor overhaul.[5] (Country girl in China who fixes motors and engines.)

Those winding machines are all from the same company, NIDE. You can buy as much automation as you want, depending on your labor costs. Option [4] is cost-effective if you can have one machine tender per machine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FiCQX0y7-A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZvSem4Cd8

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vqLxMlvk0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrcnl3Zjc6Y

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0LOfUjE4SA

[–] bad_haircut72 1 day ago

The opportunity for the west is that an engineer with todays resources can work on building [1] for $5-10k and get into the DC motor business from your shed. Im working on this myself right now, I want to try and start an autonomous manufacturing company here in Australia, maybe I'll start with motors. I predict once the war is over, Ukraine will become a robotics & manufacturing powerhouse because they've already got this model working

[–] Alien1Being 21 hours ago

The problems with Australia are:

1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.

2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.

[–] unrented7977 17 hours ago

Companies survive longer when you buy from them

[–] Alien1Being 49 minutes ago

People tend to buy from companies with reasonable quality products.

Australian made products unfortunately do not pass that initial hurdle..

[–] ragebol 12 hours ago

> you

No, that is only one customer. There need to be lots of customers for a company to survive. So, ideally you recommend, based on good quality.

You take a bit of a gamble if you need warranty or customer service later on.

Some sort of network effect again, I suppose. There's a better term that's can't find now.

[–] ulaw 1 day ago

Rotorlab (rotorlab.com.au) are or were doing this in Australia. They had a couple of posts about their machinery: a winding machine, CNC mill, etc. I believe they were bought out pretty quickly by a US company. Can't recall who though.

[–] idiotsecant 1 day ago

Are you winding something in an incredibly specialized kV / wattage / torque or something? DC motors are incredibly inexpensive, how could a hobbyist sell them?

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

The only problem with PM motors is magnets. Everything else is trivial.

[–] pseudohadamard 1 hour ago

> Motor winding is an amusing problem.

Also really difficult to do, with huge tradeoffs depending on whether the construction is 2-core, 4-core, interpoled 4-core, coreless, slot-wound, salient poles, and many more configs and winding types. In particular cheap salient-pole motors can be wound directly with automated machinery while better slot-wound motors need to have the coils formed first, then inserted into the rotor slots, which is a manual process and complicated further by the fact that the coils are skewed to minimize torque ripple, no-one's really managed to automate that process yet.

So if you saw a factory making a mixture of salient-pole motors for toys and slot-wound motors for serious use you'd see exactly what TFA is describing, salient-pole automated, slot-wound with human operators.

If you want to see what real highly-automated Chinese manufacturing is like, look at one of Bunny Huang's videos on electronics assembly. Then for contrast look at the videos of how it's done in Pakistan.

[–] is_true 20 hours ago

China has so many advantages it's unbeatable. For one, they didn't start a "tariff war". Then they are cheaper in every step of the way, from the labor to build the factories to the logistic involved when selling the actual products.

[–] fakedang 17 hours ago

Well they've now begun an export-controls regime on practically anything of industrial value.

[–] hackeryogi 1 day ago

This was pretty much my conclusion while reading the article too.

Just to extend your point - chinese car manufacturers are not only producing more cars, they're innovating at a faster pace too. While I'm not an expert, there is enough and more on social media around this. Eg: https://x.com/dhh/status/2113500613082329576?a=fscIadYr4U1xm...

[–] fragmede 9 hours ago

> 3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes.

It is the intention of Atomic Machines to make that not true.

[–] mmooss 1 day ago

China manufactures many things but that's not the key part of the value chain. iPhones are manufactured in China (and elsewhere in Asia but Apple in Cupertino is the trillion-dollar company, not the actual manufacturers.

The key parts are R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent. The question is, how well are Chinese organizations doing in those capacities in regard to robotics. My impression is that the answer is, quite well.

The focus on manufacturing is (in many cases) a twisted approach of economics. In the mid-20th century the West did very well with mass production. It was an innovative technology at the top of the value chain. But in early-to-mid 21st century, it's (often) an old, ~commodity technology and the ROI is poor. It's also physically not good for workers in many cases. When looking for economic growth you want to aim for top of the value change, for the future, not what was done 70 years ago - it won't work the same way economically anymore. In economics, you can't return to what worked before.

[–] stann 1 day ago

The problem with the "West" going forward is that R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent are exactly the areas at most risk of AI disruption leaving the physical grunt work as the only remaining moat

[–] somenameforme 23 hours ago

Yeah this is the thing I think most are missing about LLMs. They're just seeing the current valuation of things and picturing the future as being the same, but with different efficiencies. But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0.

But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.

[–] sandos 23 hours ago

Im not sure this is true:

"But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0."

When the pirate party was big in EU, there was much talk about copying approaching the cost of 0, and therefor we would never pay for copying data, only creating new data.

I guess this all due to copyright law, and it will not disappear anytime soon, but still. I would not be too quick to draw that same conclusion.

[–] somenameforme 19 hours ago

I'd look to the past at similar 'revolutions' and what it did to existing players. For example 'computer' was the name of an occupation that existed for millennia. [1] Yet so complete was the obsolescence that I think most people (certainly including myself) never even realized these people existed, but it's quite obvious once you think about it.

Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.

But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.

I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

[–] ben_w 20 hours ago

I don't think you can draw any conclusion from a party which never became a government, one way or the other.

However, we do have Wikipedia. Wikipedia was never valued at the peak sales price of Encyclopedia Britannica times the number of people online, if it was it would be worth around $16 trillion.

[–] chabska 1 day ago

Manufacturing doesn't work like in Minecraft, like you put the raw material into a box, pick the blueprint, then POOF the finished product pops out. There's actually a lot of ingenuity and innovation in manufacturing. To say that the field has been static for 70 years is absolutely foolish

[–] skew-aberration 23 hours ago

It is interesting that you consider R&D, design, and engineering as something fundamentally different to manufacturing, rather than its heart and soul.

[–] ahartmetz 23 hours ago

Stupid work for you, smart work for us (and let's be real, that is the idea) doesn't work forever if the other guys are smart, too. And they are.

[–] mmooss 16 hours ago

I did say China seems to do well in those respects.

But it's difficult to leap ahead from step 0 to step 3, as you need the gains from step 0 to achieve step 1, the benefits from step 1 to achieve step 2, etc. Some of those benefits are food, shelter, healthcare, education (hard to have engineers without it, for example), physical infrastructure, finance, honest and skilled government, etc.

[–] ahartmetz 13 hours ago

On the other hand, catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time. China is catching up fast. I think the cheating / dishonesty gives Westerners the wrong idea - Chinese cheating is like doping at the Olympics: if you want to win, you have to be among the best and cheat.

[–] mmooss 12 hours ago

> catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time

Yes, absolutely. You can see many places have followed that path; you can skip the economic policy and technological R&D and just use mature solutions - South Korea and Taiwan, for example.

The 'cheating' - I assume you mean about IP - is nonsense to me. Who made the rules? The people who want to preserve their IP, and they would make different rules if they didn't have IP themselves. China didn't make those rules.

[–] ahartmetz 11 hours ago

I also mean stuff like stealthily reducing quality until the customer notices and such things. It seems to be more common in B2B than in B2C.

[–] RussianBot9580 5 hours ago

That's what Americans want to buy: barely functional cruft to sell at Walmart. China also makes plenty of innovative quality products. The US bans those. Cars are one example.