Google has announced that its Everyday Robots Project has deployed some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google’s Bay Area campuses to clean and test its technologies. “We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices,” Everyday Robot’s chief robot officer Hans Peter Brøndmo said in a statement.
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“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,” Brøndmo added. Perhaps not the most exciting or scary robot designs we’ve seen, they aren’t much more than arms on wheels. They have 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.
According to Brøndmo, the ultimate goal of the Everyday Robots Project is that its machine learning technology will be the first to enable robots to operate in “unstructured” environments like homes and offices. It’ll mean that users won’t need to go through a lengthy and complicated setup process when deploying these machines in their own environments.
While the update is a decent step forward, it is by no means close to being ready for the mass market. For the foreseeable future, these tasks will still be done by humans as it will be much cheaper and still more thorough. However, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is still pouring millions of dollars into this project, so it obviously believes there is a future for the tech. Whether it becomes a mainstay in our homes and offices remains to be seen.
