Five New Robots, All AI in Another Guise

Robotics is now an artificial intelligence subfield.  Perhaps it always was, but now it’s being driven more by the state of AI than by any mechanical improvements.  Here are some developments to underscore that.

The first I saw this year was “Chick-fil-A’s lemon-squeezing robots cut over 10,000 labor hours per day: report” (Greg Wehner, Fox Business, January 8^th).  It’s a way for the chain to make lemonade, in “a plant just north of Los Angeles with machines occupying space larger than a typical Costco Wholesale,” which employs 120 who are among other tasks “bagging the juice and sending it off to Chick-fil-A locations all over the country.”  It seems simple, but lemons vary in size, could not as effectively be juiced with ordinary machines, and using robots spares the company “injured fingers.”  The process also allows the company to remove “the oils from the peels,” which are “sent to cosmetic and fragrance industry companies, which brings in a new stream of revenue.” 

Next, “Is this robot after our hospitality, retail and healthcare jobs?” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 12^th).  The automation in the question is a Pudu Robotics product known as “FlashBot Arm.”  It is “semi-humanoid,” “is designed to interact with its environment in a more human-like way,” and with its arms and “dexterous” hands can “perform tasks such as pressing elevator buttons, swiping card keys and carrying objects.”  It is almost five feet tall, and “automatically returns to the charging station when the battery is low.”  It uses lidar “for real-time mapping and obstacle avoidance,” costs about $28,000, and has a “10.1-inch touchscreen capable of displaying facial expressions.”  Could this become standard at offices around the world?

The next day, we saw as an “AI humanoid robot learns to mimic human emotions and behavior” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 13^th).  It is a Walt Disney Company product, “uses advanced artificial intelligence to replicate natural gestures and deliberate actions with striking accuracy,” and “learns by observing and mimicking human operators who guide its emotional responses during interactions.”  Disney will apply it, Newton, “to enhance its robotic character platform.”  This one could be controversial, but with more and more people expecting such powerful technology, especially at that company’s theme parks, Newton will catch few by surprise.

From the same writer and source, we wonder, “Can this $70,000 robot transform AI research?” (April 18^th).  This product, Reachy 2, is from open-source AI company Hugging Face.  It is another “state-of-the-art humanoid robot” designed to be “a lab partner for the AI era,” and is “already making waves in labs like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.”  The piece told us that Reachy 2 is “perfect for research, education and experimenting with embodied AI,” and would “help with the chores,” but got no more specific than that.  Is it worth $70,000?  That will probably depend on how much value it can actually add.

The last one was a classic automaton application, updated for modern technological, and political, times.  “China Has an Army of Robots on Its Side in the Tariff War” (Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, April 23^rd).  As “factories are being automated across China at a breakneck pace,” reaching higher levels “than in the United States, Germany, or Japan,” the country will be well placed to “continue to dominate mass production even as its labor force ages and becomes less willing to take industrial jobs.”  Automobile production is a huge area, but so are “many thousands of back-alley workshops” such as a place with “11 workers who cut and weld metal to make inexpensive ovens and barbecue equipment,” scheduled to replace some with “a robotic arm with a camera,” running $40,000 instead of 2021’s almost $140,000, which “uses artificial intelligence to observe how a worker welds the sides of an oven, and then duplicates the action with minimal human intervention” – just as automated barbers did in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.  And there are and will be vastly more.

Overall, robots are, and will continue to be, highly beneficial AI products.  If they are relatively unconnected to other resources, the fear they generate will be simply physical instead of existential.  Eventually they will unnerve no one.  They will be less prone to other problems with the technology such as hallucinations.  If office AI use turns out to be little more than advanced editing, robots could save artificial intelligence’s value, much as applications in human-driven cars are now showing the worth of autonomous vehicle research.  That might be good enough – or it may not.  Hang on.