alt Hacker NewsMost manufacturing operations have a long tail of stuff that is done by people because it's just not worth buying/designing a specialized machine for. That's exactly the stuff that people do currently that humanoid robots might step in and do cheaper.
Employees cost roughly 70-120K per year. A lot of work in automotive is skilled work that pays relatively well. So, the economic case is easy to understand.
That's why there are lots of companies trying to produce humanoid robots. If they get good enough, lots of companies would buy them. A humanoid robot costing about 100K that can work around the clock (minus charging, battery swaps, servicing, etc.) doing work that otherwise would be done by a person could earn itself back in well under a year. Maybe it will cost a bit more or a bit less.
Will they be able to do anything? Not right away probably. But they'll probably be able to do useful things which means people don't need to do these things and can do more valuable things with their time.
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Employee costs vary greatly depending on where the factory is located. Here in Italy, a line operator costs around €60,000–70,000 per year, and half of that goes back to the government for public welfare redistribution.
Robots costs have a fixed CapEx that humans don't have. If they become expensive you can move the factory to a cheaper nation.
People keep saying that a humanoid robot will cost around €30,000, but is that just for the hardware, or does it include all the additional services required to operate it? Will they be as interchangeable as humans, who can be reassigned to a different task in 30 minutes without notice?
Honestly, it still doesn’t make sense to me; to use an analogy, it's like you're building and "horseless carriage" instead of a car.
I work in manufacturing and one of the driving forces here is the proposed cost of these humanoids. The target price range given by some companies is somewhere between 10k€ and 30k€, which would make them insanely competitive vs a human or a custom automation (which is easily over 100k€).