Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google’s offices
What does Google's rear keep company Alphabet want with robots? Well, it would like them to clean up around the office, for a start.
The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project — a team inside its data-based X labs consecrated to creating "a all-purpose learning robot" — has moved some of its epitome machines come out of the closet of the lab and into Google's Quest Field campuses to implement some light custodial tasks.
"We are now operating a fleet of more 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks round our offices," said Everyday Robot's chief robot officer Hans Peter Brøndmo in a blog post. "The one robot that sorts trash can now live equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors."
These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the oddment of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. In that respect's a "head" on top of the towboa with cameras and sensors for machine visual sensation and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumptively for sailing.
As Brøndmo indicates, these bots were first gear seen sorting out recycling when Alphabet debuted the Mundane Automaton team in 2019. The big anticipat that's being made away the ship's company (as well as by galore other startups and rivals) is that machine learning wish finally enable robots to operate in "unstructured" environments like homes and offices.
Right now, we're very serious at building machines that can carry retired insistent jobs in a factory, simply we're stumped when trying to cause them to replicate heart-shaped tasks like cleanup up a kitchen or folding washables.
Think about information technology: you may birth seen robots from Boston Dynamics performing backflips and saltation to The Rolling Stones, but have you always seen one take out the trash? IT's because getting a machine to rig never-before-seen objects in a novel stage setting (something humans do every solar day) is extremely vexed. This is the problem Alphabet wants to solve.
Is it going to? Well, maybe one day — if company execs feel it's worth aflame through millions of dollars in research to achieve this goal. Surely, though, humans are going away to be cheaper and more efficient than robots for these jobs in the foreseeable future. The update today from Familiar Automaton is neat, just information technology's far from a leaping forward. You buns see from the GIFs that Alphabet shared of its robots that they're still lentissimo and awkward, carrying out tasks inexpertly and at a glacial pace.
Yet, it's still definitely something that the robots are being tested "in the unrealistic" rather than in the lab. Equate Alphabet's machines to Samsung's Bot Handy, for example; a confusable-looking tower-and-arm bot that the company showed off at CES finish year, patently pouring wine and loading a dish washer. Leastways, Bot Handy looks equivalent information technology's performing these jobs, but really IT was only carrying out a prearranged demo. Who knows how capable, if the least bit, this robot is in the real number world? At least Alphabet is determination this out for itself.
Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google's offices
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791267/alphabet-google-everyday-robot-project-cleaning-office-prototype
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