Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body @ WIRED – I pay for WIRED so, I think this is pay-walled. Any way, this is a pretty insidery article, by Hans Peter Brøndmo, (former vice president at Google X / general manager of the Everyday Robots) – Google’s seven-year effort to create AI-powered robots capable of operating wherever people also are. “Everyday Robots,” goal was to build fully autonomous robots that could assist with daily tasks, driven by AI (video). Tons of technical challenges, this is hard to do – teaching robots to perform complex tasks reliably in unpredictable settings (where people are, not just robot-only areas). Google shut down the project in 2023.
Some great photos and interesting quotes …
“Eight and a half years later—and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI—it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on “minimum viable products” and VCs’ general aversion to investing in hardware…”
“The reason we called Everyday Robots a moonshot is that building highly complex systems at this scale went way beyond what venture-capital-funded startups have historically had the patience for. While the US is ahead in AI, building the physical manifestation of it—robots—requires skills and infrastructure where other nations, most notably China, are already leading…”
A few thoughts, could all of this work be published, open-sourced, patent-free? The author makes a very compelling case for all the benefits of robots helping people and ends the article with
“How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned.”
It seems pretty clear the VC route did not work (and may never work?), so what could work? With humans re-developing the same robot solutions over and over, a huge bit of time-savings could be had with some agreed upon shared knowledge / standards / etc. Every robot-human-helper ends up with the same demos, solving many of the same problems, then goes bust (see my MAKE article from 2011 “If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It!”).