Robotics

Housekeeping robot quickly learns a range of autonomous chores

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The Mobile ALOHA open-source robot fries up a shrimp
Stanford University
The Mobile ALOHA open-source robot fries up a shrimp
Stanford University
For US$30,000-odd in parts, you can build a mobile robotics platform capable of training and executing autonomous tasks
Stanford University

Stanford and Google DeepMind researchers have presented an open-source housekeeping robot, and trained it relatively quickly to sauté shrimp, rinse out pans, put pots away in a kitchen cabinet, and clean up wine spills – but it has greater ambitions.

The Mobile ALOHA platform is far from a sexy-looking machine; there's a flattish wheeled base with a 12-hour battery pack weighing it down, supporting a brutally ugly mess of scaffolding, a laptop, a top camera and a pair of clawed robotic arms with wrist cameras on each, and 14 degrees of freedom.

Onto this aesthetic disaster, a removable training setup can then be grafted, which gives an operator the ability to push the bot around, and operate its arms and claws manually to train it.

For US$30,000-odd in parts, you can build a mobile robotics platform capable of training and executing autonomous tasks
Stanford University

This 75 kg (165-lb) robot is completely open source; the project team gives you a parts list and a guide on how to build the thing for yourself. It's a relatively low-cost build considering its capabilities – but that doesn't make it cheap; you can get the parts for a little over US$30,000 if you're handy with a glue gun and a 3D printer.

You can then train away, augmenting skills the ALOHA system already knows from previous training. The team says running through a task 50 times increases the chance the robot can do a task autonomously by up to 90%, and it's released video showing some of the hands-off skills it's picked up.

But the platform is capable of so much more, as this second video demonstrates. None of this footage is autonomous – the bot is being tele-operated. But it gives an insight into the kinds of things we can expect housekeeping robots to take over in the not too distant future.

And for a dash of realism, here's a third video showing why Mobile ALOHA is still a long way from a commercial product: it still makes plenty of dumbass mistakes, so you wouldn't want it to be handling the fine china just yet.

It may be just a student-led research project, but it's part of a growing wave of mobile robots demonstrating an accelerating ability to watch, learn and autonomously repeat tasks in a range of dynamic real-world situations.

It suddenly seems possible that the end of chores might not be far around the corner ... I can't say I'm gonna miss those.

Source: Mobile ALOHA

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