What does Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, want from robots? For starters, it would like them to tidy up around the office. The business revealed today that its Everyday Robots Project — a team under its experimental X laboratories dedicated to developing “a general-purpose learning robot” — has transported some of its prototype machines out of the lab and onto Google’s Bay Area campuses to do light custodial jobs.
- The features: These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There’s a “head” on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation.
- Operations: “We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices,” said Everyday Robot’s chief robot officer Hans Peter Brøndmo in a blog post. “The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors.”
- Recycle: As Brøndmo indicates, these bots were first seen sorting out recycling when Alphabet debuted the Everyday Robot team in 2019. The big promise that’s being made by the company (as well as by many other startups and rivals) is that machine learning will finally enable robots to operate in “unstructured” environments like homes and offices.
- Machines: Right now, we’re very good at building machines that can carry out repetitive jobs in a factory, but we’re stumped when trying to get them to replicate simple tasks like cleaning up a kitchen or folding laundry. Think about it: you may have seen robots from Boston Dynamics performing backflips and dancing to The Rolling Stones, but have you ever seen one take out the trash? It’s because getting a machine to manipulate never-before-seen objects in a novel setting is extremely difficult. This is the problem Alphabet wants to solve.
- Establishment: The establishment of Alphabet Inc. was prompted by a desire to make the core Google business “cleaner and more accountable” while allowing greater autonomy to group companies that operate in businesses other than Internet services.[4][8] Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced their resignation from their executive posts in December 2019, with the CEO role to be filled by Sundar Pichai, also the CEO of Google.
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