Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reported this Friday that it is an experimental project whose objective is to create a robot that helps to perform general tasks in homes and offices
Robots designed by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are the new managers for cleaning offices, as they have been put to test for performing various “simple” tasks.
Equipped with wheels and a multipurpose arm that can be flexed, it has a “head” on top of its “body” with cameras and sensors to artificial vision and what looks like a rotating lidar unit on the side, possibly for navigation.
They will carry out tasks such as scrubbing tables with a sponge, separate trash for recycling, put chairs in their place and open doors, according to Hans Peter Brondmo, the head of Alphabet’s Everyday Robot Project.
The technology giant reported this Friday that it is an experimental project whose objective is to create a robot that helps to perform general tasks in homes and offices.
We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes who autonomously perform a variety of useful tasks in our offices, said Brondmo, in a blog post.
The head of the subsidiary recalled that these robots were first seen sorting garbage when Alphabet debuted in the Everyday Robot in 2019. The company’s promise is that the machine learning help robots operate in unstructured environments like homes and offices.
This is a great challenge that many other companies in the industry are trying to achieve, because until now, robots in factories or other places work in controlled spaces, doing simple and repetitive tasks.
In that sense, the platform WIRED noted that Everyday Robots lives on the edge of Moravec paradox, which states that it is relatively easy for computers perform devilishly difficult cognitive work which is difficult to duplicate the functions of a child two years.
Although there are other robots that do not necessarily do factory tasks such as those that interpret and dance, none of them have been seen taking out the garbage after having separated it for recycling because doing those activities are extremely complex for a machine and is what Alphabet seeks to solve.
We have not yet solved all the most difficult problems of the robotics, but we have made exciting progress and our recent experiments suggest that we may be one step closer to turn science fiction into reality, Brondmo noted on his Twitter account.