- Alphabet’s X moonshot factory has provided an update about its Everyday Robot Project. These are the details.
Hans Peter Brøndmo, the GM of The Everyday Robot Project at Alphabet’s X moonshot factory, announced in a blog post that the division has made some progress in building robots that are able to sort through the trash and reduce waste contamination. The X group is a research and development lab that used to be known as Google X.
In the last few years, The Everyday Robot Project has been working to see if it is possible to build robots that can do a range of useful tasks in the unstructured spaces of everyday lives.
“During the last few months, our robots have sorted thousands of pieces of trash and reduced our office’s waste contamination levels from 20% — which is what it is when people put objects in the trays — to less than 5%. These results are promising for a few reasons,” wrote Brøndmo. “First, they show that we’re able to create a robotic system that integrates all of the robot’s capabilities to do something genuinely useful: reducing the contamination levels to less than 5% successfully diverts waste from going to landfill. Second, they prove that it’s possible for robots to learn how to perform new tasks in the real world just through practice, rather than having engineers “hand code” every new task, exception, or improvement.”
The robots that X is working on are able to learn from human demonstration and from shared experiences. And Brøndmo pointed out that the next challenge is to see is if they can take what the robot learned in the task and apply the learning to another task without rebuilding the robot or writing code from scratch.
