Why is Alphabet spending millions for robots to perform chores that wouldn’t challenge a three-year-old?
The Plain View
Every afternoon at 1:30, the robots file into the café. Gliding their way into the dining area on four wheels, the cadre of one-armed creatures weave through a maze of tables. Like hunters stalking prey, they swivel their binocular-sized heads, staring at their surroundings through an array of cameras and sensors. Additional vision is supplied by a Lidar sensor, similar to those on autonomous cars. If these robots had weapons, their appearance would incite panic. But instead, attached to the end of each of those robot arms is a custom squeegee.
These creatures are targeting tabletops. One of them will wheel up to a table and ponder for a few seconds to determine if people are seated; if so, it moves on until finding one that’s empty. After lingering for a second—maybe taking the algorithmic equivalent of a deep breath before the “Let’s do it” moment—the robot twirls and unfurls its limb, stretching the arm over the table to methodically cover the surface with a clear disinfectant. Then it withdraws the arm to squeeze out the excess fluid into a bucket on its base. Task completed, it moves on, seeking another table to swipe.
People finishing their lunch don’t even bother to look up. The robots have been doing this for weeks.
Opening the door to a robot future. VIDEO: WIRED STAFF
No, this isn’t a desperate attempt to address the labor shortage. It’s research by Everyday Robots, a project of X, Alphabet’s self-styled “moonshot factory.” The café testing ground is one of dozens on the Google campus in Mountain View, California, where a small percentage of the company’s massive workforce has now returned to work. The project hopes to make robots useful, operating in the wild instead of controlled environments like factories. After years of development, Everyday Robots is finally sending its robots into the world—or at least out of the X headquarters building—to do actual work. It’s enough of a milestone that they invited me to observe, two years after WIRED’s Tom Simonite last looked at the project. At that point, they had robots sorting trash into the proper recycling bin. Janitorial services represent the next, if not the final, frontier.
I kid, but this is serious stuff. Everyday Robots is trying to do two really hard things, a challenge so hairy that some question whether the effort is worth it. The first is credibly performing the tasks of human helpers. Everyday Robots lives on the razor’s edge of Moravec’s paradox, which states that it’s relatively easy for computers to perform difficult cognitive work and devilishly difficult to duplicate the functions of a two-year-old. Elsewhere under the Alphabet umbrella, robots navigate complicated traffic routes, drive automobiles more safely than humans, and become the champion of Go. In the Everyday Robots world, conquering a mundane task, such as crossing a cluttered room and opening a tricky door handle, is like winning the Super Bowl. The table wiping activity, for instance, isn’t just the swipe—it includes a whole suite of actions leading up to it. Take what happens when the path is blocked by a human or object. “The proper response for the robot is, OK, do I have enough space to gracefully move around that?” says Darcy Grinolds, who is the lead of the project’s hardware reliability and design validation team. “Or do I need to reroute myself around completely?”
Darcy Grinolds leads Everyday's hardware reliability and design validation team. PHOTOGRAPH: MICHELLE GROSKOPF
The second hard thing the project is attempting to do is move toward that goal in such a way that it makes more sense, in terms of both economics and efficiency, to have a robot on hand than a bored and underpaid human.
Google, and now X, has been obsessively pursuing this vision for more than a decade. Leading the Everyday Robots team is Norwegian-raised engineer Hans Peter Brondmo, an entrepreneur and engineer who joined X in 2015 and had to make sense of a cacophony of robotics acquisitions by the former leader Andy Rubin, who left the company under a cloud of sexual harassment claims. “Hans Peter was not the obvious choice,” says X’s CEO Astro Teller. “He cares about robotics, but he would be the first person to tell you he's not a world-class roboticist. I picked him because he's a world-class entrepreneur who really understands people. And he's sort of a dyed-in-the-wool socialist—he comes from Norway!”
In an office he shares with a nonfunctional robot arm he built as a teenager, Brondmo explains that making an effective general-purpose robot became possible only with recent advances in machine learning. The engineers use machine learning to train the software to recognize objects and then run millions of simulations to compress weeks of testing into hours. This helps the lumbering robots in his lab to truly understand their environment, and build on that knowledge to accumulate a toolset that helps solve the inevitable dilemmas of coping in the wild. While Everyday Robots might not be as flashy as the dystopian androids in Boston Dynamics videos, they are optimized to get stuff done. (Alphabet once owned Boston Dynamics, but sold it off in 2017.)
Hans Peter Brondmo, general manager of X's Everyday Robots, with two friends—a state-of-the-art robot (left) and the robot arm he built as a teenager in Norway (right). PHOTOGRAPH: MICHELLE GROSKOPF
“Yes, you see really cool demos on YouTube of robots that can do backflips,” says Brondmo. “But those robots don’t know anything about the environment. You might say our robots are slow, but what they're actually doing is fully autonomous. And they're working in the world we live in, and they're actually learning to do things, simple tasks that are getting more and more advanced,” he adds. “We’re bringing robots that can live and work alongside us into the world we live in, as opposed to us moving into the world they live in.”
Everyday’s robot learning lead, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, showed me how his team trained a robot to push open a door, a task necessary for some of the robots’ jobs on the Google campus—for instance, going into conference rooms and determining via sensors if there are toxic levels of carbon. (One imagines robotic Covid monitors at some point in the future.) The door-latch training took under 10 hours. But once a single robot learns something, the knowledge is sent back to the whole fleet’s collective cloud intelligence, and thereafter all the robots can open doors with those latches.
On one hand, it’s astonishing to see these robots monitoring conference rooms and wiping tables. But then you ask yourself—why is Alphabet spending millions of dollars to perform chores that wouldn’t challenge a three-year-old? The corollary to Moravec’s paradox is Samuel Johnson’s unfortunate comparison of a woman preaching to a dog that walks on his hind legs: “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all,” said the 18th century writer and lexicologist. Sometimes at Everyday Robotics it is done well—maybe the most mind-boggling demo I saw on my visit was a choreographed robot dance where three robot units performed an eerily emotional ballet with the team’s artist in residence, Catie Cuan, a dancer pursuing a Stanford robotics PhD. Observing Cuan’s movements and coordinating their own actions via the cloud, the robots executed an intricate human-replicant interplay, while expending spare cycles to provide an improvised soundtrack made of a library of samples from the London Symphony Orchestra.
Two real tests need to be aced before everyday robots will be truly useful: They have to be cheap enough to be a cost-effective alternative to human labor, and they have to be flexible enough to cope with the near-infinite number of unplanned obstacles they will encounter in the chaotic reality that humans easily navigate. X engineer Benjie Holson—he grew up in a family of puppeteers, acquiring a perspective that he says is helpful in his current job—admits that at this point, if the robots cleaning tables were supplied with soy sauce instead of disinfectant, they would blithely soil the surfaces with it.
Software engineer Benjie Holson, who grew up in a puppeteering family, appreciates a robot-swiped table. PHOTOGRAPH: MICHELLE GROSKOPF
Getting to the point where robots can figure out if their squeegees are squirting soy sauce—and solving zillions of other unexpected real-world setbacks—is a Sisyphean journey. But it wasn’t long ago that robotic translation, or creative writing, seemed equally elusive. Assessing his team’s advances, Brondmo believes we’re on the cusp of breaking through. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not years away from being real,” he says, “but robotics are going to be a thing where the next generation is going to treat them like we treat these things”—he gestures to his phone. “Second nature.”
It may take a long time before all of us are dancing, so to speak, with robots on an everyday basis. But Brodmo and Teller are convinced that robots wiping off tables—and even bussing them!—will one day be common sights. When pressed for a business case for Everyday Robots, which I doubt will ever be cheap household items, Teller speculates that the average customer won’t buy them like Roombas, but instead arrange with a service provider to send out the bots to perform tasks, whether to clean corporate offices or help elderly clients access the loo. “Am I hoping that robots can help me to live more independently for longer?” asks Teller. “One hundred percent! I would be shocked if, in my dotage, I don't end up that way.”
And the ghost of Samuel Johnson would be shocked if he did.
Five eyes: the array of cameras and sensors in the head of an Everyday Robot. PHOTOGRAPH: MICHELLE GROSKOPF
Everyday Robots has built more than 100 robots in X's Mountain View headquarters. PHOTOGRAPH: MICHELLE GROSKOPF
