Building a robot that is both human-like and useful is a decades-old engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction.
Although the latest craze in artificial intelligence has led to a new wave of investment in the quest to build a humanoid, most current prototypes are clumsy and impractical and look better in stage performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups from pushing ahead.
“The idea is not to start from scratch and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,’” says Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robotics officer at Agility Robotics. “We are trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.”
Do we even need humanoids? Hurst makes a point of describing Agility’s warehouse robot Digit as human-oriented and not human-like, a distinction meant to emphasize what it does versus what it tries to be.
What it does for now is pick up waste bins and move them. Amazon announced in October that it would test Digits for use in its warehouses, and Agility opened a factory in Oregon in September to mass produce them.
Digit has a head with cameras, other sensors and animated eyes, and a torso that essentially acts as a motor. He has two arms and two legs, but his legs are more bird-like than human-like, with the appearance of inverted knees resembling so-called digital animals such as birds, cats and dogs that walk on their toes rather than flat feet.
Rival robot makers, such as Figure AI, take a more purist approach to the idea that only true humanoids can effectively navigate workplaces, homes and a society built for humans. Figure also plans to start with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but is aiming for a commercial robot that can be “iterated like an iPhone” to perform multiple tasks and take over people’s work as the birth rates are falling. around the world.
“There aren’t enough people doing these jobs, so the market is huge,” said Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure AI. “If we can get humanoids to do work that humans don’t want to do because there is a shortage of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, maybe even billions.”
However, at this time, Adcock’s company does not have a market-ready prototype. Founded just over a year ago and after raising tens of millions of dollars, it recently unveiled a 38-second video of Figure walking through its testing facility in Sunnyvale, California.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also trying to build a humanoid called Optimus through the electric car maker’s robotics division, but a hyped live demonstration last year of the robot’s awkward stopping steps failed to impress experts at the field of robotics. Seemingly further along is Tesla’s neighbor Apptronik, based in Austin, Texas, which unveiled its Apollo humanoid during a video demonstration in August.
All the attention (and money) put into creating clunky humanoid machines may make the whole endeavor seem like a pointless hobby to wealthy technologists, but for some pioneers of potent robots, it’s all about what you learn along the way.
“Not just about their design and operation, but also about how people respond to them, and about the critical underlying technologies for mobility, agility, perception and intelligence,” says Marc Raibert, co-founder of Boston Dynamics, best known for its dog-like robots called Spot .
Raibert said that sometimes the development path is not along a straight line. Boston Dynamics, now a subsidiary of car manufacturer Hyundai, experimented with building a humanoid that could handle boxes.
“That led to the development of a new robot that was not actually a humanoid, but had several humanoid characteristics,” he said via email. “But the changes resulted in a new robot that could handle boxes faster, work longer and work in tight spaces, such as a truck. Humanoid research has therefore led to a useful non-humanoid robot.”
Some startups focused on humanoid machines focused on improving the dexterity of robot fingers before attempting to make their robots walk.
Walking is “not the hardest problem to solve in humanoid robotics,” says Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of British Columbia, Canada-based startup Sanctuary AI. “The most difficult problem is the problem of understanding the world and being able to manipulate it with your hands.”
Sanctuary’s newest and first bipedal robot, Phoenix, can stock shelves, unload delivery vehicles and operate a cash register. These are first steps toward what Rose sees as a longer-term goal: allowing robots to perceive the physical world so they can reason about it. a way that resembles intelligence. Like other humanoids, it must look endearing because interacting with real people is a big part of its function.
“We want to be able to supply the world with labor, not just for one thing, but for everyone who needs it,” Rose said. “The systems must be able to think like people. So we could call that artificial general intelligence if you want. But what I mean more specifically is that the systems must be able to understand speech and they must be able to translate speech understanding into action, which will satisfy jobs across the economy.”
Agility’s Digit robot caught Amazon’s attention because it can walk and also move in a way that could complement the e-commerce giant’s existing fleet of vehicle-like robots that move large carts around its vast warehouses.
“The mobility aspect is more interesting than the actual shape,” said Tye Brady, Amazon’s chief technologist for robotics, after the company showed it off at a media event in Seattle.
Digit is currently being tested to help with the repetitive task of picking up and moving empty bins. But just having it there will undoubtedly raise fears of robots taking people’s jobs, a narrative that Amazon is trying to prevent.
Agility Robotics co-founder and CEO Damion Shelton said the warehouse robot is “just the first use case” of a new generation of robots that he hopes will be embraced rather than feared as they prepare to enter businesses and homes to push.
“So in 10, 20 years, you’re going to see these robots everywhere,” Shelton said. “Forever, these types of human-centered robots will be part of human life. So that’s quite exciting.”
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AP writer Haleluya Hadero contributed to this report.