Alphabet he said today that the Everyday robots Project, an experimental X labs team dedicated to building "general-purpose learning robots," moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab to Google's Bay Area campus and assigned them some light housekeeping duties.
The Verge reports:
"We now manage a fleet of more than 100 prototype robots that run a series of useful tasks around our offices," Hans Peter Brondmo, head of the Everyday Robots Project, said in a blog post.
"The same robot that sorts garbage can now be equipped with various cleaners to sweep tables, grab cups and open doors."
These robots are essentially wheeled arms, with a reusable arm at the end of a flexible arm attached to a center tower.
There is a "head" at the top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a rotating unit lidar on the side, probably for navigation.
According to Brondmo, these robots were first used to classify recycling when Alphabet made its Everyday Robot debut in 2019.
The promise given by company (as well as by many other startups and competitors) is that machine learning will finally enable robots to operate in “unstructured” environments such as homeand offices.
