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!
The real answer is that robots strong enough to do useful work are strong enough to hurt people, damage all the things around them. Including other robots, and themselves.
It’s a safety issue. It’s basically the same reason why self-driving cars are still fraught with problems despite being a simpler problem to solve.
Also, batteries aren’t good enough (yet).