Automate It: A Robotics Podcast
Sep 8, 2026 · 51 min · 10 segments
In Ep 65 of Automate It, Stefan and Ilia ask a deceptively simple question: how hard can it be to put a big red stop button on a robot? But first, they play the Robot Invention Game and draw…
Ilia BaranovHost
Stefan Seltz-AxmacherHost
Are you training the, like, how many flocks of birds the windmills will kill? Like, is that the idea?
That's why we should spend billions of dollars to stop all offshore wind farm development.
Like, As the silly man in our little podcast duo, A, how hard could it be? B, there are not that many offshore wind farms right now.
I don't know a real number, but I would say comfortably less than two dozen, a couple dozen large-scale offshore wind farms in the world.
If offshore wind farms or wind farms in general were going to be, call it 10% of our power grid, 20% of our power grid, there'd have to be, I don't know, rough math, hundreds of large offshore wind farms.
The fact that an offshore wind farm is a aquatic environment with big solid structures the water can bump you into makes that labor perilous to say the least.
And the fact that there's so few of these environments and how relatively expensive they are means that if you wanted to take an end-to-end neural network approach for some sort of robot to do something at this facility, you'd almost certainly need a large amount of synthetic training data.
Are you training the, like, how many flocks of birds the windmills will kill? Like, is that the idea?
That's why we should spend billions of dollars to stop all offshore wind farm development.
Like, As the silly man in our little podcast duo, A, how hard could it be? B, there are not that many offshore wind farms right now.
I don't know a real number, but I would say comfortably less than two dozen, a couple dozen large-scale offshore wind farms in the world.
If offshore wind farms or wind farms in general were going to be, call it 10% of our power grid, 20% of our power grid, there'd have to be, I don't know, rough math, hundreds of large offshore wind farms.
The fact that an offshore wind farm is a aquatic environment with big solid structures the water can bump you into makes that labor perilous to say the least.
And the fact that there's so few of these environments and how relatively expensive they are means that if you wanted to take an end-to-end neural network approach for some sort of robot to do something at this facility, you'd almost certainly need a large amount of synthetic training data.
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