Picture this: You're making cookies for a holiday get-together, and things have gotten hectic in the kitchen. You've opened the oven door, donned the oven mitts and grabbed a hot metal tray of warm snickerdoodles. You turn around to place them on the countertop and… whoops, you forgot to prepare something for the tray to rest on. As you weigh your options, you notice that some trivets have started to move out from their storage space on the counter. They're rolling, on their own, right into place.
It seems like magic, like something out of Beauty and the Beast, but it's one possible vision of your future kitchen, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. With the help of cameras, a variety of AI models and some tiny little wheels, ordinary objects can find their way to the exact spot you wanted them to be, without you having to look for them.
CNET
It's easy to picture a robot housekeeper, like Rosie from The Jetsons, but that isn't the only way that robotics and artificial intelligence could theoretically make life easier for you at home or in the office. The same technology could be applied at a much smaller scale to the objects you already interact with regularly -- your coffee mug, your stapler, your kitchen supplies and so on.
"Instead of bringing additional robots into our existing environments, what if the objects that are already there in our homes that we're already familiar with can be both intelligent and robotic?" Violet Han, a Ph.D. student at CMU and lead author of a paper on the research, said in an interview.
Big, powerful humanoid robots give us a lot to worry about: They're heavy and strong, capable of causing damage if they malfunction. They approach that uncanny valley of creepiness when something looks almost human. And it's very hard to make one work reliably. Human dexterity is an extraordinary achievement of evolution, and we've built our world with the assumption that those who move in it can do things like grip a doorknob. That's a tough skill to give to a robot. If those robots do become commonplace, they won't be the only thing that's automated.
"I have a hard time envisioning that you have these robot butlers, but then at the same time, everything else stays just as static as it was," said Alexandra Ion, an assistant professor at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, who leads the Interactive Structures Lab.
Adding AI and mobility to the objects we use solves many of those problems. It allows automation to feel more natural -- you're still using the same kind of stapler, even if it has little wheels and appears to have a mind of its own. But there are new problems, like privacy and security, that would have to be sorted out before your coffee mug starts to chase you every time you yawn.
Violet Han uses a stapler attached to a platform controlled by AI models. Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University
Objects in motion
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