Users can train Toyota's robot butler with virtual reality, showing him in advance the (even complicated) tasks he will have to perform.
Five years ago, Toyota announced a $ 1 billion commitment to its Research Institute (TRI) and has hired hundreds of engineers to work on robots and AI-based products, such as self-driving cars.
This week, TRI offered journalists the opportunity to participate in a virtual open house (you can watch part of it in the video I put in the post) to learn about the state of the art of the research carried out by the laboratory.
Dear, did you buy a new chandelier or are you just glad to see me?
Most of the prototypes shown at the event are aimed at helping people in their homes. The idea of an assistant robot has been around for decades, but has only recently begun to be plausible in reality, especially in countries like Japan, where an aging population could lead to shortages of support staff.
Toyota's robot butler
TRI's core home robot design is built to hang from a special set of tracks built into the ceiling of a home. A real "relevance" that operates within a limited (and therefore well-controlled) radius.
A little different from the robot butler we imagined roaming around the house with his beautiful tray in hand, but Toyota has evidently recognized a series of advantages. One of these is the small footprint in the home.
With this configuration it takes the butler robot much less time to learn the layout of the house. It doesn't need to learn complex routes around obstacles to get from one place to another.
TRI's robot can fold down to the ceiling when not in use, so it effectively takes up zero usable space.
A privileged view
One of the biggest advantages of this solution, however, seems to be the particular top-down point of view. It gives the machine a better vantage point to observe its actions and the position of different objects it may need to manipulate.
Toyota is banking heavily on the vision of a robot butler that learns from a limited set of parameters. Basically, if you want the robot to learn to clean countertops, you can perform that action in a virtual reality environment. The robot butler will understand your actions and imitate them in the real world, naturally monitoring the variables.
It may seem cumbersome, but it isn't. Consider that after a short time there would be many actions around that were also taught to other robots and shared online, a bit like the automatic recipes of certain kitchen robots.
How is the robot butler made?
Numerous joints in the robotic arm allow it to move in all directions. Some of the joints are redundant, which allows them to rotate and orient themselves in virtually any position.
There's just one detail to fine-tune now: to install such a robot butler the entire house would essentially have to be designed around the machine.
Ideally, the robot would be a central part of the house's planning before construction begins.
Therefore I would say the concept makes more sense in multi-unit buildings such as aged care facilities. If builders could make the units look nearly identical inside, engineers could train just one robot, then share the information with the rest of the machines in other rooms.
Other details
In addition to the full house bot, TRI also showed off some smaller aspects of this technology. One of the most important is the claw with which the robot butler will pick up items. A system of lights projects a series of dots inside the robotic “hand” and a camera to observe how the dots on the limb deform when it picks up an object.
As a result, the system can analyze, in real time, the properties of the object it is interacting with. The demo showed it stacking several delicate wine glasses on top of each other on an unfamiliar surface.
Toyota and TRI's progress is remarkable, and amidst the enthusiasm they plan to continue working on this type of technology in the future. There are no plans to make it available to the public yet, but the company hopes to implement at least some of these technologies in the near future.