A humanoid Robot
For the past year, I have been working with some amazing robotic- and software engineers on a humanoid service robot. The complexity of designing and expanding the software for such a general-purpose robot cannot be overstated. As no doubt, anyone with an engineering background can attest to, simple tasks such as grabbing an apple or pressing a button, though trivial for a human, can be daunting, even when just focussing the effort on this particular task. An additional layer of complexity arises when the goal is not only to execute this exact motion but to ease the way future expansions for similar movements.
While Aeolus Robot still has a long way to go, before the robot reaches parity with human dexterity, the focus on fast-to-market gives us the potential to develop new use cases with the custom in the loop. This video shows some of the more impressive feats Aeo performs every single day, such as picking up boxes and opening doors.
The rise of Transformer models has of course shaken up the robotics market, and we will undoubtedly see a lot of highly verbose service robots in the next couple of months, thanks to the explosion of highly performant LLMs. Google’s Do as I Can, Not As I Say is an impressive approach to an AI-integrated way of structuring use-case solutions. Novel Segmentation algorithms such as Segment Anything will vastly improve robots’ ability to perceive it’s surrounding in more detail than previously feasible.
And finally, Tesla decided to bring down the full might of their AI pipeline onto the task of general-purpose robotics. They have decided to take the more difficult route of bi-pedal locomotion, which comes with hardware and control challenges of its own. Optimus seems to still be looking for a market the robot can fill, but if their approach pays off, there will be no shortage of applications.
While my time at Aeolus is ending, I am nonetheless proud of the product and the solutions I helped develop. Everyone at Aeolus that I interacted with was dedicated to their task and driven by this fascinating vision our robot represents.
Robotic engineering is a passion that I share with many in this company. The technology at our disposal holds vast potential beyond the current state of robotics; this makes me all the more excited to participate in shaping the future of robotics in the coming decades.