Two highlights worth relooking from this talk by
@xiaopenghexpeng, CEO of
@XPENG_Global:
1/ His team has been building robots for 7 years, and nobody ever wanted to touch or hug one (0:25 in the clip). Steel reads as equipment, maybe dangerous. Skin is what flips it into a companion. Everyone races on torque and joint count, but whether people want the thing near them is a different problem, and his answer starts from skin.
2/ On "why not build the tool into the robot" (1:10): then it can only ever use one tool. Humans already made a million tools, all shaped for human hands. He wants the robot that picks them up.
@adcock_brett made the same argument for Figure, one platform amortized across millions of tasks.