Humanoid robots are one of those dreams that sometimes feel like we’re about to come true. Boston Dynamics has the Atlas robot, Tesla is developing robotics, and companies like Mercedes, Amazon, and BMW are or will be testing robots for industrial use. But these are very expensive robots that perform tasks in controlled environments. At home, they may still be far away.
Enter Apple. Mark Gurman is at Burundi Zeng said that its robot project is headed by former Google employee John Giannandrea, who was responsible for Siri and was once responsible for Apple Car. The car project is cancelled, Vision Pro is launched, and “Apple Smart” is coming. Will this be the next big thing?
According to his message, it will be at least a decade before Apple launches any humanoid robot. Still, simpler ideas might be closer – a smaller robot that can follow you, or another idea that involves mounting a large iPad display on a robotic arm that interacts with the caller on the other end by nodding and the like. Express emotions.
Many, if not most, homes are nests of robotic chaos.
Moving robots is tricky, though. What will happen to Apple? Do Have a home robot that follows me? Does it play music? Does it have wheels, or does it walk? Do I need to have a conversation with AJAX or SiriGPT or whatever chatbot the company names it? Or, given Apple’s rumored OpenAI deal, are there other chatbots out there?
For that matter, what form will it take? Can it fly? Will there be wheels? Could it be a ball? Can I kick it?
Its form factor is at least as important as its intelligence. The house has stairs, furniture that sometimes moves, clothes dropped on the floor, pets that get in the way, and children who leave things behind everywhere. The door that opened or closed perfectly yesterday cannot be opened or closed today because of the rain. A haphazard kitchen remodel 20 years ago might have meant your refrigerator door bumped into the corner next to the stairs, because why would you put the refrigerator space anywhere else? Dave? But I digress.
Based on some of the details revealed, Apple’s robot idea appears to be in line with the trend we’ve seen lately of charming and novel robots.
A recent example is Samsung’s Bot Handy concept, which looks like a robot vacuum cleaner with a pole and an articulated arm on top, and is designed to perform tasks like picking you up or sorting your dishes. There’s also Ballie, the adorable ball robot that Samsung showed off at several CES shows. The latest version follows humans, with a projector that can be used for watching movies, video calls or entertaining the family dog.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s $1,600 tablet-equipped home robot Astro remains invitation-only. It’s charming, with the sleek aesthetic of late-’90s Compaq computers, but it’s unclear whether it’s functionally more useful than some cheap wired cameras and the Echo Dot.
LG says its Q9 “AI Agent” is a mobile smart home controller that can guess your mood and play music for you based on how you feel. I was very skeptical about all this, but it has a handle, and I do like the technology of the built-in handle.
I still want a sci-fi future filled with robotic home assistants that rescue us from mundane tasks that take us away from the fun things we’d rather be doing. But we don’t all live in the pristine, orderly abodes shown in Samsung’s Ballie videos or the videos Apple makes showcasing its hardware in personal spaces. Many ordinary homes are nests of robotic chaos that tech companies will have a hard time accounting for as they create robots designed to follow us or perform household chores autonomously.
There are other ways to go. Take the Ring Always Home Cam, for example. Judging from the demo video, it will be very noisy, but it can also be useful and even good. Putting the unimportant privacy implications aside for now, it seems promising to me, mainly because of its mobility and the fact that it’s only designed to be a patrol security camera.
This concentration of functionality means it’s predictable, which is why single-purpose gadgets and gizmos come into play. After some experimentation, I have the ability for my smart speakers to always hear me, or where it would be most useful, I can place my robot vacuums in rooms that I know I will keep clean enough so they don’t get trapped Or break something (usually).
My robot vacuums – the Eufy Robovac L35 and Roomba j7 – do okay, but sometimes need rescuing when they find my cat’s wool toys or eat paper clips (they’re always on the floor, even though I never do). Actually need one to even know where we put them).
I have a kid and lo and behold, preparing paths for them elsewhere in the house just adds more work. That’s fine with me because the two rooms they’re responsible for are the ones that need the most vacuuming, so they’re still working out the kinks, but it has implications for the broader hurdles robotic products face.
It’s unclear whether artificial intelligence can solve these problems. A New York Times A recent opinion piece points out that despite concerns about the technology over the past year and a half, generative artificial intelligence has not proven that it will be any better than “mediocre vacuum robots” at producing text, images and music. good.
Given the boom in generative artificial intelligence and rumors that Apple is developing a HomePod with a screen, a delightfully stationary smart display that obediently turns its screen toward me all the time It seems to be at least within the company’s control. Moving around a house and interacting with objects is a trickier problem, but companies like Google and Toyota have successfully used generative AI training methods to train robots that “learn” how to make breakfast or quickly sort items with little effort. No explicit programming is required or required.
It would be years, maybe decades, before Apple or anyone else gave us anything other than clunky, semi-useful robots that lumbered around our homes and became Weird, frustrating, or broken. Heck, phone companies haven’t even figured out how to send out notifications yet, except that they’re the bane of our collective existence. They’ve done the job for homes like mine, where we only have to go about a week before we see a bunch of clutter gathering like a snowdrift, ready to ruin some poor robot’s day.
