Inside X’s mission to make robots boring

These creatures are targeting the tabletop. One of them will roll on the table and ponder for a few seconds to determine if everyone is already seated; if so, it will continue until it finds an empty one. After lingering for a second — possibly the algorithmic equivalent of taking a deep breath before the “Do it” moment — the robot rotates and stretches its limbs, extending its arms on the table to methodically cover surface with a transparent disinfectant. It then retracts its arm to squeeze excess liquid into a bucket on its base. Mission accomplished, it continued, looking for another board to swipe.

Everyone finished their lunch without even looking up. The robots have been doing this for weeks.

No, this is not a desperate attempt to solve the labor shortage. It was the research of Daily Robots, a project of X, Alphabet’s self-proclaimed “moon factory”. The cafe test site is one of dozens on Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, where a small percentage of the company’s massive workforce has now returned to work. The project hopes to make robots useful, operating in the wild instead of controlled environments like factories. After years of development, Everyday Robots is finally bringing its robots into the world — or at least out of the X headquarters building — to do real work. It was a milestone enough that they invited me to observe, two years later Tom Simonite of WIRED final review of the project. At that point, they already had robots that sort trash into the appropriate recycling bin. Cleaning services represent the next, if not the last, frontier.

I’m a kid, but this is serious. Every day Robots is trying to do two really difficult things, a challenge so difficult that some question whether the effort is worth it. The first is to reliably perform helper tasks. Daily robots live on the razor’s blade Moravec’s paradox, which states that it is relatively easy for computers to perform difficult cognitive work and that it is difficult to replicate the functions of a two-year-old child. Elsewhere under the Alphabet umbrella, robots navigate complex traffic routes, drive cars safer than humans, and become Go champion. In the everyday Robot world, conquering a mundane task, such as crossing a messy room and opening a tricky doorknob, is like winning the Super Bowl. For example, wiping the board isn’t just a swipe — it includes all the actions that lead up to that action. See what happens when the path is blocked by people or objects. “The proper response for a robot is, OK, do I have enough space to move gracefully around it?” Darcy Grinolds, head of the project’s hardware reliability and design validation team. “Or do I need to completely reroute myself?”

The second hardest thing the project is trying to do is work towards that goal in a way that makes more sense, both economically and efficiently, with a robot in hand rather than a boring and underpaid human. .

Google, and now X, has pursued this vision obsessively for more than a decade. Leading the Everyday Robots team is Norwegian-grown engineer Hans Peter Brondmo, an entrepreneur and engineer who joined X in 2015 and must have been clear on a series of robotic acquisitions by former leader Andy Rubin, who has since leave the company under him cloud sexual harassment claims. “Hans Peter was not the obvious choice,” said X CEO Astro Teller. “He is interested in robotics, but he will be the first to tell you that he is not a world-class robot builder. I chose him because he is a world-class businessman who really understands people. And he is a socialist dyed in wool – he is from Norway! ”

In an office he shares with a non-functional robotic arm he built as a teenager, Brondmo explains that building an effective general-purpose robot is only becoming possible. given the recent advances in machine learning. Engineers use machine learning to train the software to recognize objects and then run millions of simulations to compress weeks of testing into hours. This helps the sluggish robots in his lab really understand their environment and build on that knowledge to amass a toolkit to help solve unavoidable dilemmas. from dealing with wild environments. While Everyday Robots may not be as flashy as the old fashioned robots in the Boston Dynamics videos, they are optimized to get the job done. (Alphabet used to own Boston Dynamics, but sell it in 2017.)