Liquid metal robot is anything but

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Recently the online magazine NewScientist published an article about a “Metal robot [that] can melt its way out of tight spaces to escape.” This sounds pretty amazing, but when you start to read into the article and watch the included video it becomes clear that the story is little more than clickbait.

The “robot” depicted is nothing more than combination of metals, mostly gallium that the scientists manipulate with a magnetic field. It’s an inert blob of material molded into the shape of a lego minifig, and that’s as close to a robot as it’s ever going to get. The article is clearly trying to relate to a certain movie about murderous cyborgs from the future. Don’t worry though, we’re not in any danger.

Calling this object a robot would be about the same as calling a ball bearing moved through a maze with a magnet, a maze-solving robot. The worst part of the video comes at the end when there’s a jump cut. We see it jump from the melted remains of the “robot” outside the cage and some bits still sticking to the bars of it’s cage where it passed through, to a fully re-formed figure standing in front of the cage.

They weren’t able to manipulate it into doing this, rather someone cleaned up the melted bits, shoved them back into the mold and reset the scene. If the material were to somehow be able to automatically return to it’s previous form that might be fairly innovative, but that’s not the case here. It’s simply a lump of metal with a low melting point that can be warmed up by current induced via magnetic fields penetrating it. (ie: inductive heating)

The definition of a robot is essentially an automated machine that can execute specific tasks with little or no human intervention. As much as the creators and writer want this to be a robot, it’s not.

Is Tesla potentially putting the public at risk with it’s cost-cutting strategy?

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I’ve made no attempt to hide the fact that I’m not a fan of Tesla. It was never about the technology, but rather their business practices and the way they treat their customers. However, that may be about to change with what I would consider to be a penny wise, but pound foolish decision to remove radar and ultrasonic sensors from it’s vehicles.

In a report from Electrek, Tesla is basically saying that they’re going all-in on computer vision and dropping other sensors with the laughable justification that it’s how humans navigate. Considering the potential consequences, perhaps laughable isn’t the right word.

One of the features that impressed me the most about Tesla’s early self-driving feature was the integration of radar data. A perfect example of this can be found in this 2016 video of a Tesla detecting a vehicle several cars ahead that was moving slowly/braking and was able to avoid an accident. You can’t see the vehicle ahead as it’s completely obscured, but the Tesla radar could. Can a Tesla camera system do the same? Maybe, but I’m not sure I’d want to trust an autopilot system without radar. (or some other form of beyond visual spectrum object detection)

Tesla’s track record with self-driving cars hasn’t exactly been fool-proof either. (even with the additional sensors) I’ve been in Teslas that have had difficulty in daylight with the painted lines of the road. There have also been numerous incidents reported where autopilot didn’t see a crossing/oncoming vehicle resulting in fatalities. Beta testing software features is fine for the consumer smartphone and computer industries, but it shouldn’t be something that happens in cars on public roads with safety-critical systems.

Tesla does state in their announcement that “at this time, [they] do not plan to remove the functionality of ultrasonic sensors in [their] existing fleet.” Hopefully the same is true for the radar sensors as well. This appears to be targeted at new production models only with models 3 and Y, and later the S and X.

This Reuters article from early June explains some of the details of why a camera-only system could be less safe than one with additional radar sensors. Tesla may think they’re saving (making) money removing the sensors and making development easier for themselves, but not tackling the more difficult problem of integrating different sensors leaves gaps that may put people’s lives at risk.

Update 12/2022: Drivers of new vision only Tesla models already running into problems, some features not yet available

Update 12/16/2022: Tesla appears to be reversing course and bringing radar back based on FCC filing. Elektrek quoted the same tesla filing indicating Tesla would be marketing a new HD radar in mid-January of 2023. This is good news for potential new buyers and potentially for improvements in FSD, but what about those who bought the stripped down versions? If I were one of those customers, I wouldn’t be too happy.

Hey Microsoft! Do Better.

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The title might seem a little over the top, but let me explain. This afternoon, I had one thing I wanted to do. I wanted to sit in my racing sim and practice. A seemingly simple thing, right? The thing is, I hadn’t sat down at my sim in about a month. (life has been a bit busy lately) As I expected, I had some AV updates that needed to be applied… no problem. The batteries on my wireless mouse were giving out… annoying, but again, no problem. The system seemed super sluggish after doing the AV updates, so took a look at oh, yep… a bunch of updates from Microsoft. No problem, I’ll let these install and then I’ll play I thought. Oh, how naive of me.

I should have known something was up earlier, but I let my trust in the update process get the better of me. You see, earlier I’d loaded up a piece of software that controls the haptic feedback on my seat and it had a problem because it couldn’t find the output device. The output device is a small usb audio interface that sends analog signals to an amplifier that drives a transducer, which in turn makes the seat vibrate. This sudden change was a result of driver updates, something that I’d specifically disabled. (for reasons that will soon become apparent) That seemed weird, but the device was still there and I just had to re-select it.

The second thing that should’ve tipped me off was an NVidia driver update coming through Windows Update. Strange I thought… I’m sure I disabled that. (I had previously) Still, I thought… what’s the harm. It probably needs it anyway. What I didn’t see was one of the other update packages contained a driver update for the onboard audio. This had already completed, but the worst part was that in the process of updating, it removed the user interface that allows you to configure things like surround sound. I checked the properties for Sonic Studio 3 and found that the application was missing, but there was a handy menu to install it. Awesome! (it wasn’t awesome)

Clicking this menu brought me immediately to the listing for this application on the Microsoft store, but when I clicked it the download immediately failed and told me to log in. I tried to do that and was met with a progress wheel that timed out and failed. This happens when you use a local account with Windows and don’t log in to Microsoft’s services. Ok, annoying, but I’ll just go to the Asus ROG driver page and download them I thought. What I got from the manufacturer support site was a driver-only download. Cue a bunch of searching through forums until I find a link to a slightly older version of the same driver package with the entire suite. (also hosted on the manufacturer site)

What happened became apparent at this point. Asus has moved current & future versions of this application/driver package onto the Microsoft store and removed it from their own support page. This has the effect of tying continuing support of their products to Microsoft’s services. It also revealed that Microsoft is continuing to reset certain settings on your computer to their factory defaults without notice or warning in what are supposed to be security & quality updates. Microsoft, if you’re listening… this is how you erode user trust.

While I’d managed to turn off driver & application updates via Windows Update (again) and had fixed the sound issues… I was done. This whole debacle cost me over an hour of my time, by which point I was so disgusted I didn’t even want to do the one thing I’d sat down to do in the first place.