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I took a tour of the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg body shop. It's heavily automated with industrial robots inside safety cages. But they still have human workers pick up parts from rolling carts and place them into templates for the robot arms. BMW has been running a trial with Figure humanoid robots to automate that remaining piece. Apparently those robots haven't worked very well, but presumably Hyundai thinks they can do it better?

https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robot...



BD was training Atlas for Hyundai factory in Savannah, Georgia for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHeh7qwils


Some colleague of mine visited the Mini plant earlier this week. Apparently they had a Boston Dynamics dog patrolling simply to spot stuff that had been left where it wasn't supposed to be left


Can't you just, you know, stick another robot arm on the damn carts and have it offload itself? Surely there's a simpler way.

Maybe what they're actually acquiring is Handle, not Atlas.


Conveyor belts? What about those funny looking warehouse robots that are on wheels and just move pallets around, maybe an arm strapped to it? Surely there are myriad ways to do this more efficiently and precisely than a humanoid robot! Just look at Intel's Fabs for example with the ceiling robots moving the delicate wafers..




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