Is the key to autonomous cars that don’t run over pedestrians and crash into telephone poles a humanoid robot behind the wheel?
The researchers, one of whom consults for Toyota, developed and trained a “musculoskeletal humanoid” called Musashi to drive a small electric car through a test track.
With its mechanical hands, it can rotate the car’s key, pull the handbrake and switch on the turn signal.
Musashi did use the accelerator in a separate experiment, the researchers say.
Fortunately, the researchers say they’re up for the challenge, with plans to develop a next-gen robot and software.
The weather’s getting hotter — but not quite as hot as the generative AI space, which saw a slew of new models released this week, including Meta’s Llama 3.
In other AI news, Hyundai-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics unveiled an electric-powered humanoid follow-up to its long-running Atlas robot, which it recently retired.
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This week Boston Dynamics retired its well-known Atlas robot that was powered by hydraulics.
Then today it unveiled its new Atlas robot, which is powered by electricity.
Its new Atlas robot is leaner, and appears to have improved range-of-motion.
Size and ability to contort and maneuver are not cosmetic elements to a humanoid robot — they can unlock new use cases and possible work environments.
Happily for those of us who want a domestic robot to handle household chores and hold our hands whilst we cry, there are other startups working on the humanoid robot project.
Mentee Robotics hasn’t been in stealth, exactly.
The Israeli firm caught a small wave of press at the tail end of 2022, following Tesla’s initial humanoid robotics announcement.
Even so, the firm caught some headlines because its co-founder and chair, Amnon Shashua, founded Mobileye and the well-funded AI firm, AI21 Labs.
On Wednesday, however, the company offered up a glimpse of Menteebot, its own stab at the rapidly growing humanoid category.
In fact, this is one of those spots where the precise definition of what constitutes a humanoid system gets blurred.
Now that humanoids are all the rage in the robotics industry, Boston Dynamics on Tuesday officially retired theirs.
Boston Dynamics has been focused on commercializing technologies for a number of years now.
Boston Dynamics was, of course, well ahead of the current humanoid robotics curve.
Another wrinkle in today’s news is that, as of February, Boston Dynamics was still showcasing Atlas’ capabilities.
Meantime, in lieu of a gold watch, Boston Dynamics is offering up a video featuring some of Atlas’ greatest hits and most spectacular falls.
Sanctuary AI announced that it will be delivering its humanoid robot to a Magna manufacturing facility.
As is often the nature of these deals, the parties have not disclosed how many of Sanctuary AI’s robots will be deployed.
The news follows similar deals announced by Figure and Apptronik, which are piloting their own humanoid systems with BMW and Mercedes, respectively.
For its part, Magna invested in Sanctuary AI back in 2021 — right around the time Elon Musk announced plans to build a humanoid robot to work in Tesla factories.
The company would later dub the system “Optimus.” Vancouver-based Sanctuary unveiled its own system, Phoenix, back in May of last year.
While these systems have soft forms, however, many of their components are still rigid like their more traditional counterparts.
Researchers are working to bring flexible elements to create locomotion for these soft robots.
Researchers at the school are using live muscle tissue in tandem with synthetic robot parts for a classification of robots known as “biohybrid.”MIT Professor of Engineering Ritu Raman confirmed the process with TechCrunch, noting, “We build the muscle tissues from mouse cells, and then we put the muscle tissues on our robot’s skeleton.
Biological muscle tissue can be difficult to work with and generally unpredictable.
The flexures still needed to be tweaked to the specifications of the robot, ultimately opting for structures with 1/100th the stiffness of the muscle tissue.
It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans.
For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter has eschewed robots that look like people.
As the two-year-old startup’s name implies, Collaborative Robotics (Cobot for short) is interested in the ways in which humans and robots will collaborate, moving forward.
When his run with the company ended in summer 2020, he was leading the retail giant’s industrial robotics team.
AI will, naturally, be foundational to the company’s promise of “human problem solving,” while the move away from the humanoid form factor is a bid, in part, to reduce the cost of entry for deploying these systems.
Bay Area/Colombia-based delivery robotics firm Kiwibot this week announced that it has acquired Auto Mobility Solutions.
The Taipei firm produces chips specifically for the world of robotics and autonomous driving.
Kiwi founder and CEO Felipe Chávez Cortés does, however, tell TechCrunch that rising tensions between the U.S. and China are a key motivator for the purchase.
Prior to this, the U.S. government had set its sights on various Chinese tech giants, including Huawei and DJI.
Taiwan’s tenuous geopolitical situation, coupled with its vastly outsized share of the semiconductor market, has placed it at the center of the conflict.
With the Apple Car firmly in the rearview, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots.
In spite of those efforts, however, the company has fared best when it focused its resources back into its robot vacuum.
The hockey puck design that’s prevalent across robot vacuums isn’t ideal for anything beyond the core functionality it’s built for.
That’s likely a big part of the reason the company is selling it as a development platform.
There’s nothing wrong with teleop in many scenarios, but it seems unlikely that people are going to flock to a home robot that’s being controlled by a human somewhere far away.
