buildandbreak

Wow, this definitely doesn't seem like a throwaway account!

We send emails back and forth through a translator, and sometimes via facebook chat. There is no trash talk, but we do have to work through a lot of disagreements! I will say that we all have a ton of respect for those guys!

Yes, and also made the "swoosh!!" noises while flailing our arms around.

ON IT, BRO!

Real talk: Construction and material handling equipment looks the way it does for very good reasons. They are cheap and easy to maintain. These robots are very much not. There are a ton of moving parts and some very sensitive parts that are hard to maintain. The advantage that humanoid robots have is that they are more intuitive to control for humans. You can imagine putting on a suit and having the robot mirror your actions. That said, I think we are a long way off from seeing these things on construction sites. It's still much cheaper to just build a simple, unintuitive machine and train an operator than it is to build an expensive, intuitive machine, and be able to pay untrained joe-schmoe to operate it.