ReadyBot “Gamer Bots” Do Chores From The Cloud
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 30 of April , 2009 at 4:09 am
We initially wrote about the ReadyBot research group last October, and showed you the robot they’ve been working on to take over somewhere between 40% and 80% of your daily housework. ReadyBot’s First Law of Practical Robotics states: “Consumer robots generally will only do a job 80% as well as a human being, at best. If that isn’t acceptable, don’t use a robot.” The reason for this law is that getting a robot to autonomously do all the basic, straightforward stuff that takes up 50% or whatever of your housework (vacuuming the floor, doing dishes, etc.) is (in an extremely relative sense, mind you) not so bad, but as tasks get more and more specific complicated, getting it to do that last 10% or 20% (like changing a lightbulb) on its own is exponentially more difficult. And ultimately, it just doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time and resources programming a robot to change a lightbulb when it may only find itself in a situation where it needs to know how to do that a couple times a year.
ReadyBot has been testing a new strategy with household robots: on-demand teleoperation, or “cloud robotics” as they call it. With cloud robotics, the robot is always connected to the internet, and all of the scripts that it uses to operate are streamed, which allows for dynamic upgrading of an entire class of robots. But the clever bit is that when faced with an unfamiliar or particularly complex task, the robot just calls for help, and a human supervisor (who is a resident of the same cloud) takes the robot over and guides it via cameras and a virtual 3D view, much like a video game (hence “gamer bots”). The operator also has the capability to write or alter a script, in effect “teaching” the robot to perform a new task. And thanks to the cloud, that lesson will be instantly available to robots everywhere else.
Since this system depends on human guidance, albeit in a limited capacity, it would probably involve some kind of subscription service. But the idea is that you can drastically reduce development costs, making the robot itself substantially cheaper overall.
[ ReadyBot ] VIA [ Technology Review ]
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Category: Artificial Intelligence, Consumer
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