The Unitree links claim a 9000mAh battery will last it 2 hours; I don't know the voltage, but even at 5.5 V cells, that's only about 25 W average power consumption.
I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on battery capacity.
My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-driving car (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at most 1/10th the available power to do that (because they're physically smaller).
Between algorithmic improvements and Koomey's law, I think this will take at least 5 years between any given category of customer being able to afford no-steering-wheel-needed self driving cars, and the equivalent for androids.
Given the Waymos were doing geo-fenced cars with no safety drivers in the vehicles in 2017 (but still had an employee in the back with access to an emergency stop button)*, this gap is compatible with the recent press releases and youtube videos going around about robotics — but as nobody has yet started actually shipping this level of self-driving cars directly to end users**, my only guess for personal general-purpose domestic androids is: some time after 2030 as a minimum, but probably later than that.
* https://phys.org/news/2017-11-waymo-autonomous-vans-human-dr...
** No, Tesla's current one doesn't count; it will only count when it actually ships without a steering wheel or when people are actually allowed to use it while sleeping.
I find this difficult to believe, both because that's a very low power draw and because that would be penny-pinching on battery capacity.
My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-driving car (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at most 1/10th the available power to do that (because they're physically smaller).
Between algorithmic improvements and Koomey's law, I think this will take at least 5 years between any given category of customer being able to afford no-steering-wheel-needed self driving cars, and the equivalent for androids.
Given the Waymos were doing geo-fenced cars with no safety drivers in the vehicles in 2017 (but still had an employee in the back with access to an emergency stop button)*, this gap is compatible with the recent press releases and youtube videos going around about robotics — but as nobody has yet started actually shipping this level of self-driving cars directly to end users**, my only guess for personal general-purpose domestic androids is: some time after 2030 as a minimum, but probably later than that.
* https://phys.org/news/2017-11-waymo-autonomous-vans-human-dr...
** No, Tesla's current one doesn't count; it will only count when it actually ships without a steering wheel or when people are actually allowed to use it while sleeping.