How would you like a robot that can clean your kitchen? I wouldn't mind it actually. A team of engineers in California's Silicon Valley are determined to create a simple household robot that can clean a kitchen. The Readybot project has been in the works for years and the team has finally created a prototype for testing. The robot looks like R2-D2 from Star Wars and boasts 2 arms and multiple cameras that the robot uses to detect, track and grasp objects such as dishes and glasses found in any household kitchen. The video below shows the prototype Readybot in operation.
Clearly, the robot still needs a considerable amount of work before it can become truly useful but the team has done an excellent job up to this point. Making it a bit smaller so that it can navigate around crowded rooms is definitely one basic improvement that Readybot needs. Other improvements include better manipulation and faster operation.
At the end of the day, everyone expects that useful household robots have to be complex devices as capable as humans are. The truth is that given the current state of robotics and artificial intelligence technology, we are more likely to develop very specialized robots that do one job really well. This has already been proven by the success of iRobot and their household cleaning (indoor and outdoor) army of robots. Chances are that for the next 10-15 years, we are likely to see many such specialized robots running around our houses taking care of daily household chores while we are at work. After this period is over, we will see the availability of more complex robots developed with a human-like appearance and capable of multiple tasks including the learning of new tasks probably via demonstration by a human operator. The future of robotics will be very interesting indeed.
2 comments:
12:44 PM
I think you're right that in the short term we will be seeing more specialised robots, but there will come a point at which people are complaining that they have too many robots taking up physical space and why can't all these tasks be consolidated into a single machine.
9:56 PM
Bob, I agree with you but I believe that the transition from many specialized robots to one general purpose robot will be smooth and it will happen over time. I think it will happen in the same way that until a few years ago, we had one device for playing music, one for voice communication, and another for watching video. These days, we can buy one device that can do all three of these. I believe that the same will happen in robotics over the next 30-40 years starting from highly specialized ones in the next 10-15 years.
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