I’ve spent the past few months diving into recent publications from conferences like CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RAUL, CVPR, and some preprints of note. It seems like we’re getting pretty close to robotic assistants that can perform a limited range of tasks and be deployed in people’s homes. Where do we think we are with this tech? What do you think is the biggest bottleneck we need to overcome? Do you think the “internet scale” behavioural cloning techniques from Google will lead the way? Or something more RL-VL oriented?
I’m at the start of an AI PhD with a focus on robotics so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this!
I was just at CoRL a couple weeks ago so I’ll just briefly summarize some of the discussions I was part of/ listened to.
As other have mentioned, homes are a complex and unstructured environment where new situations are constantly being introduced to a system. Places like factories and warehouses where robots are starting to become common are generally more controlled and configurable to allow robots to operate.
Building on this is the issue of reliability. Cutting edge research will achieve SOTA results on tasks with something like a 90% success rate. For many tasks that humans do around the home, a 90% success rate is pretty terrible. I think it was Russ Tedrake at the conference that said something along the lines of “if someone broke 10% of the dishes while loading the dishwasher, we’d immediately take them off dish duty”.
The field is making tons of progress on both of these fronts but it’s just not at the point where systems are ready to be widely deployed in homes.
That is a really good point, thanks!