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Robots have been promising to help with household chores for years, but most still struggle with the simplest tasks.
An American start-up now says its newest robot can finally handle the kind of jobs people do every day.
California-based Sunday Robotics says it has produced a home robot in less than two years capable of carrying out routine household chores such as clearing a table and loading a dishwasher.
In a video released by the company, the wheeled robot Memo is shown removing items from a dinner table and placing them inside a dishwasher.
The robot also lifts two wine glasses with one hand, folds socks, and operates an espresso machine in the video.
“We present a step change in robotic AI,” Sunday Robotics cofounder Tony Zhao wrote on X. Memo broke no wine glasses during more than 20 live demonstration sessions, he added.
Data gathered from humans
Roboticists have long faced difficulties in designing systems that can reliably handle the objects found inside homes.
Human hands make use of thousands of touch receptors, which allow people to judge grip and pressure. Creating machines with comparable control has proved complex and costly.
Memo is trained on data gathered from people performing real tasks.
The robot has Lego-like hands. Instead of using synthetic data, simulations or teleoperated systems, the company built a glove shaped to match its hands.
The company has more than 500 human data collectors across the United States who wear the gloves and record information, including the amount of force used to lift different objects.
“In robotics, if the only thing we can rely on is teleoperation, to gather the amount of training data it would take like decades for sure,” Zhao said in an interview with a podcast called TBPN.
Sunday Robotics said the glove system is far more cost-effective than teleoperation, which is operating a machine remotely. Memo costs approximately $200 (around €173) per glove instead of around $20,000 (around €17,300), which is the cost of a teleoperated robot.