A team of robotics researchers at the University of Edinburgh have designed a robot arm powered by AI that can serve people coffee and carry out other tasks.
According to a study published in the Nature Machine Intelligence journal by the university on Wednesday, the researchers combined AI (specifically GPT-4) with advanced sensitive motor skills and programmed them into the robot arm, which has seven movable joints and dubbed the Kinova Gen3, so that it can adapt to tightly controlled settings and interact with objects and obstacles in real-time. In the case of the robot arm, one of the tightly controlled environments is the kitchen.
The researchers put Kinova to the test by asking it to make a cup of coffee and decorate a plate with a random animal for a human who is having friends over for cake. Kinova interpreted the verbal instructions and navigated the kitchen by opening cabinets to find a mug. Then it set the mug down on the table, scooped a spoon of ground coffee from a jar, emptied it into the mug, and poured in hot water from the kettle. Finally, it took a pen and drew an animal of its choice onto a paper plate.
By breaking down the tasks from high priority to lowest — coffee first, plate decoration second — and adapting to unforeseen events, like someone bumping into it, Kinova was able to do execute abstract reasoning thanks to the programming provided by GPT-4 and other open-source AI programs, including as Haystack and Vebra. Ruaridh Mon-Williams, a PhD student at Edinburgh who led the study, said this is the sort of future we’re heading towards.
“We are glimpsing a future where robots with increasingly advanced intelligence become commonplace,” Mon-Williams said. “Human intelligence stems from the integration of reasoning, movement and perception, yet AI and robotics have often advanced separately. Our work demonstrates the power of combining these approaches and underscores the growing need to discuss their societal implications.”
This means that somewhere down the line, the next cup of coffee you get from Starbucks or any other coffee shop will come from a robot.
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