Alphabet launched an independent robotics software company Intrinsic under X Development. Intrinsic has been in the works for five and a half years. Intrinsic develops software tools to build easy-to-use, inexpensive and flexible industrial robots.
Programmers spend hundreds of hours hard-coding robots for a particular task. Even then, many delicate tasks such as inserting plugs and moving cords are still off limits to robots.
Intrinsic strives to give robots the ability to “automatically sense, learn and make adjustments as they complete tasks, so that they operate in a wider range of settings and applications.” Over the years, the team has worked in real-world manufacturing environments to develop software that uses techniques such as automated perception, deep learning, motion planning, simulation, reinforcement learning and force control.
Credit: Intrinsic Blog (X Development)
The team trained a robot to complete a USB connection task in two hours. In separate cases, several robot arms learned to assemble an architectural installation and a simple piece of furniture. Intrinsic CEO Wendy Tan-White believes the company will significantly reduce the time, cost and complexity of using industrial robots.
Past attempts
Google’s parent company has an ambitious robotics initiative called the Everyday Robot Project (officially launched in 2019) as part of the X Division. Hans Peter Brondmo, the current Managing Director of the Everyday Robot Project, joined X in 2016. Everyday Robot is the first moonshot robotics project to go public.
At the start of the Everyday Robot project, the team collaborated with Google AI to teach them simple tasks to develop new abilities. The team investigated how robots can learn from human demonstrations, shared experiences, and how to simulate robots in the cloud. The project uses a variety of machine learning techniques, including simulation, reinforcement learning, and collaborative learning. For two years, the Everyday Robot project has been at half mast.
Google has great ambitions in the field of robotics. It all started in 2013 with Andy Rubin, then head of Android operating system software, stepping down to run Google’s robotics program called Replicant. Under his leadership, Google made several purchases. However, in 2014 Rubin was involved in a sexual harassment case and had to leave the company, leaving the project behind.
Alphabet launched robotics at Google in 2019. Led by Vincent Vanhoucke who previously helped create Google Brain, the mission of robotics at Google is simple: to teach robots to perform new tasks. The division has already collaborated with a startup called Fetch. Google researchers trained the startup’s mobile robots to navigate.
Robotics: a risky business
co-founder of OpenAI Wojciech Zaremba said the company disbanded its robotics team in a Weights & Biases podcast. “In fact, I had been working on robotics for several years. Recently, we changed focus at OpenAI. I disbanded the robotics team. There are actually many areas that are very rich in data. Ultimately that was holding us back, in the case of robotics, ”Zaremba said.
Industrial robotics companies like Rethink Robotics have had to go out of business. Honda withdrew its Asimo robotics project after a decade of development. Another popular humanoid robot maker Boston Dynamics was in the red for a long time until Hyundai took a controlling stake for $ 1.1 billion.
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