Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off.
In a paper presented at ICRA 2021 this month, researchers from the University of Bremen conducted a “Robot Household Marathon Experiment,” where a PR2 robot was tasked with first setting a table for a simple breakfast and then cleaning up afterwards in order to “investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation.” While this sort of thing kinda seems like something robots should have figured out, it may not surprise you to learn that it’s actually still a significant challenge.
PR2’s job here is to prepare breakfast by bringing a bowl, a spoon, a cup, a milk box, and a box of cereal to a dining table. After breakfast, the PR2 then has to place washable objects into the dishwasher, put the cereal box back into its storage location, toss the milk box into the trash. The objects vary in shape and appearance, and the robot is only given symbolic descriptions of object locations (in the fridge, on the counter). It’s a very realistic but also very challenging scenario, which probably explains why it takes the poor PR2 90 minutes to complete it.
Because it's still really hard for AI to do these things too. Current systems like GPT-3 show signs of generality in limited areas, but we currently have no general world-model that can do multiple tasks. We still have to daisy chain narrow systems together to get a robot to function in the real world, and each of those narrow systems can easily break. They don't feed back into each other like biological general intelligence can, and aren't very adaptable either.
And then you have power too! Batteries are better than they were even ten years ago, but we still need plenty of improvements to make domestic robots that can work quickly enough for long enough to act as autonomous servants.