alt Hacker NewsI simply do not understand why you would ever prefer a fully humanoid robot as opposed to a humanoid torso on some other locomotion system.
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Presumably for outdoors or home deployment. The world is designed for bipedal locomotion, and human bipedal locomotion is designed for the world.
But yes, for a factory or commercial environment it doesn't make too much sense. It would be cheaper to adapt the environment, and many commercial environments are already designed to be accessible for wheelchair users anyway.
Isaac Asimov already explained that better than I could (https://www.reddit.com/r/asimov/comments/pm84ud/why_robots_a...):
> Besides that, our entire technology is based on the human form. An automobile, for instance, has its controls so made as to be grasped and manipulated most easily by human hands and feet of a certain size and shape, attached to the body by limbs of a certain length and joints of a certain type. Even such simple objects as chairs and tables or knives and forks are designed to meet the requirements of human measurements and manner of working. It is easier to have robots imitate the human shape than to redesign radically the very philosophy of our tools.
There are a few of these being sold as products: AGIBOT has some models like that (eg https://www.agibot.com/products/A2_W). One argument that could be made for legged robots is that these wheeled ones can only work in wheelchair-accessible spaces. Legged robots can also balance themselves dynamically: a wheeled robot may tip over if anything violates its static balance, eg. carrying a load high up and going through a steep incline, though I guess having the torso be tiltable as in https://www.agibot.com/products/G2 addresses that.
Legged robots overall have more implementation complexity, spend energy just to idle standing up, but can go over much more varied terrain provided the controller is good enough. There are ways to adapt wheeled bases to different terrains (eg. larger wheels, whegs, RHex, rocker-bogies) but we know how to use legs to locomote over many terrains from personal experience, while the perfect wheeled/non-legged locomotion system perhaps remains to be designed.
There's also the way robotics is going toward data-driven methods, which in some forms (ie. imitation learning) require human teleoperation data. Here having the robot mimic the human form makes the mapping from human joints to robot joints easier (compared to other morphologies where you'd need to figure out how to best approximate a human motion with the joints/joint limits your robot has, though this is not impossible).