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Robot does chores, but badly

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 20 Jan 2016
The Atlas robot can vacuum floors, but not without extensive input from its operators.
The Atlas robot can vacuum floors, but not without extensive input from its operators.

While many can easily see the appeal in robots that clean users' houses for them, it may be a while still until this technology is fully fledged.

The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) last week posted a YouTube video of its Atlas robot performing a number of mundane chores, including sweeping and vacuuming the floor. "Atlas wanted to be helpful. It went... okay," read IHMC's comment on the video.

The robot performed the chores with little precision and extensive - and time-consuming - input from its programmers, who would have been able to sweep and vacuum the studio floor much more quickly, easily and thoroughly than Atlas did. The two-minute video has in fact been sped up by 20 times.

Atlas is a semi-autonomous robot, which means its operator must tell it where to go and what position to assume before the robot comes up with a way to reach this position.

"Most of the stuff in this video is controlled by me, but in a co-active way," Atlas operator John Carff told IEEE Spectrum. "I'm not simply sitting there with a joystick teleoperating the robot," he clarified.

"I tell the robot through the UI that I want to grab a bottle off the table by clicking the bottle and making sure that the resulting hand is in the correct place. Then, the robot tells me how it's going to move its entire body to reach that location, through a preview in the UI. If I'm okay with the plan the robot has come up with, I tell it to execute that motion," Carff explained.

"It takes a lot of patience and out-of-the-box thinking to be a robot operator. When you approach a task or situation you've never seen before, you need to think of as many different ways of completing that task as you can and figure out what approach would be best for the robot," Carff said.

Yet while Atlas is a far cry from popular fantasies of a robotic housekeeper `a la Rosie in The Jetsons, the video demonstrates significant progress in robotic technology.

"Okay, lifting up one foot and activating that pedal [on the vacuum cleaner] is the most impressive thing I've ever seen a two-legged robot do. It's a snap for us humans, but I totally get how complex that is for a robot," says YouTube commenter Kevin Frushour.

But for IHMC, Atlas' house-cleaning hobbies should not be read as a promise of robotic butler development. The robot merely needs to be run often to check and ensure the compatibility of code updates, and this process is less boring when developers can play with a wider variety of tasks, such as housework.

Users wishing for a more tech-savvy way to do chores can in the meantime look to simpler, single-task devices, such as robotic vacuum cleaners, floor-moppers and gutter-cleaners.

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