These AI Robots Can Do Your Chores for You
Forget humanoid robots. What you really need is a robot to clean up all of your mess. Say hello to Tidy bot. A rolling robot with gripper arm that sees your mess, picks it up and knows exactly where it needs to go into the bin or a drawer or on the shelf. Tidy bot is just one of many projects that pave the way for general purpose home robots. I'm here at the Stanford Robotics Center with your first look inside. It's where students and researchers are working on the future of human robot interaction, quadrupeds, cooking robots and even underwater moots are all here. But let's get back to tidy boat. These cameras on the ceiling, locate items and obstacles in your space. While cameras on the robot itself identify objects, it picks up. If you have something like a lego block, for example, lying around on your floor, it can also decide um if you, if you told it so that this is actually a toss item that won't break. Uh And uh so that's of course, much faster than uh rolling up to everything and placing it carefully. Heidi bot uses a large language model to categorize your stuff. After you show it a few examples of where things belong, it learns where to put similar items and guess what? It can even make your bed. But we're still a ways off from seeing this Roomba on wheels, roll into our homes. Unfortunately, the tidy board itself, as you see it right now, here it's extremely expensive. Just the arm cost $40,000 by the way. But if there was a consumer product company that would take this idea and use hardware that was actually much cheaper than what we are using, then I think the price can go of course down by a lot if we think about the software um there, I think we are getting definitely close to having a product like tidy bot actually driving around um in your apartment and picking up the right things, autonomous cars already have this technology to just like navigate around spaces. So that could be something that is implemented on tidy bot already. And we have ways to recognize new objects now and categorize them according to your preferences as well. Not to be outdone on cleaning. Mobile. Aloha puts away pots and pans, wipes down the counter, loads the dishwasher and can even cook a simple meal. Autonomously. Welcome to Lexi's kitchen on the menu today. Delicious, sauteed shrimp. Mobile, Aloha learns how to do all this through imitation. So I'm gonna tele operate the robot while it captures images, motion and manipulation data. It's like exactly reflecting the actions that I'm doing. Yeah, you can move more drastically. We kind of set the task whether you saute a shrimp or store a pot into a cabinet. Uh We randomize the position of the object or even the background of the scene. And also maybe the different types of part you want to place it in and then repeat that process for 5100 times and use that data to train AM model that will eventually control the robot. So I'm not going to train this 50 times, but I am gonna try to saute a shrimp and help train this robot. You can move around to feel the you know, resistance of the robot turn around. So I've just got to think of this as an extension of myself right now. Let's get my arm just holding on fairly to the plastic. Yes, I got 11 more try. Yes, I got them all. Yes. It's like a video game. My shrimp are in the pan. I can hear the sizzle. It does require a lot of concentration. Yes. Time to give this a little bit of a stir. This is kind of wild that I'm able to do this and it's learning from me. Uh huh. There we go. So how did I go? Zip Peng rate me out of 10. You think? Eight? OK. Eight. That's not bad. Dinner is served. Mm delicious. I don't wanna eat this. OK. So what's next for Mobile Aloha. Obviously, this is not ready to be in our homes. We are aiming to reduce the footprint or the size of it and also make it, you know, it can hopefully it can come climb series and go outdoors in the future. We hope that we can leverage some foundation models from the natural language processing and computer vision to help the robot to understand what is going on, what task they need to complete without any help from humans. But household robots need to do more than just chores here at the center, students and researchers are also studying human movement. So robots can be better equipped to safely roam around our homes. We have mobile robots like the ones you see here that are running around and can run around safely among people, but you'll notice what they don't do is touch people, right? The next generation of robots needs to help people live longer on their own, right? And so to help people live in their homes longer, you need to be able to help them move around the home. You need to be able to keep them from falling. We need robots that can do that, that can be gentle and yet strong um and safe and no robots are like that today. That's, that's the next generation and that's why we study dance. We need to understand how people move and how robots can move around them a lot of people think when they think robotics, they think about task oriented robots, it's replacing humans, it's taking jobs. This is not about like trying to just replace all humans so they don't have to work. Right. It's actually about where we don't have enough people to do jobs. Right. That we don't have enough people to take care of the next generation of aging. It's about trying to solve the next generation of problems. In our case, we talk about advancing robotics making it so that we can do with robots. What you couldn't do before. Thanks so much for watching Beta Test. Make sure to subscribe and let me know what other robots you wanna see going forward. Sweet Dreams midnight.