Future of Robotics From Google

Google began to create startups with companies around the United States and Japan a few years back to create human-like robots. They have drifted away from the human-like idea of robots and have been creating a more simplistic display of these AI robots. The new phase of the AI robots being created and crafted by Google is called Robotics. In the article, I read it discussed three different robots that have been tested in the labs but not yet brought into the real world. The first was one that was able to place its claw in a bin and pick up a singular object out of a mixture of Ping-Pong balls, plastic bananas, and wooden blocks. After precisely grabbing the object in between its two “fingers” the robot, with an 85% success rate, could throw the object into another bin several feet away. The intelligence of this robot is amazing to me, even though it seems like such a simple task. The robot learns from experience and has a 5% more accuracy than a human to do this task. I believe that yes, this is a simple task but if an AI robot can learn and adapt and result in doing better than a human, what else can it learn and do better than us? The next robot presented in the reading was one with three fingers, which differed from the first robot in that they were more finger-like than claw-like. This interested me to find out how these robots were to help benefit us. The article says that the tools are being trained to play with an object that will help them learn how to control and operate other objects. I consider this to be fascinating work in that the robots use such fine motor movements to move objects and that with this they can soon, single-handedly manage equipment. The third robot presented was one that I believe you can compare its intelligence to that of a Roomba or what we were shown in class that is used in Amazon warehouses nowadays. This device is to function like that of what is seen in Amazon warehouses but will be able to function more advanced, by being able to recognize foreign objects in its path and be very beneficial in warehouses. This third robot, called Fetch, could potentially do many more functions than that found at Amazon. I think that with the recognition embedded within it can do more than the single task of moving objects from one place to another like the robots at Amazon do. I think that all three of these devices will be amazing to see in action at warehouses and I believe they will create a more efficient and beneficial warehouse. These robots could eliminate the simple tasks that could become more time consuming and will help better the productivity of any workplace. This could change the world of production and free workers to tend to the more tedious work that robots can’t do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/technology/google-robotics-lab.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FArtificial%20Intelligence&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection


https://vimeo.com/126306100