very cool! Both demos were very entertaining and charming. Could you share other behaviors/tasks that you foresee Maurice being able to tackle? I personally have trouble brainstorming tasks that I would find useful.
For sure! We see it as the perfect blend between physical and digital abilities, so tasks can be chained together very creatively.
For this small form factor (25cm high), here is what we foresee (and it's a small subset of what's possible).
- Picking up trash and moving it away.
- Tidying up the floor after your kids (moving toys away), so that a roomba could clean - or a version of Maurice with a vacuum.
- Watching for burglars / other surveillance tasks, and sending you an email or notification if it perceives someone or something fishy.
- Greeting you in the morning, waking you up, telling you about your emails.
- Playing with you or your kids: Hide and seek, Tag, Simon Says, Easy board games... Maybe this one is a bit of a stretch at first, but I could see it play Connect Four?
- Taking pictures. I had multiple folks tell me they would like the robot to go around at home events, take pictures, and assemble them / put them somewhere in the cloud after. This should be pretty straightforward to do!
- Check in on your kids or elders frequently, see if they are okay. Especially this second one is very important to us. You could then define a primitive to send you an email or notification is something's wrong. Or a daily recap of the people did, with pictures. And ask the robot remotely to do something.
For many of these use-cases we will post videos in the coming months about how to do them, as the AI and software gets more reliable.
For bigger robots running on the same system we develop (we have a bigger robot to reveal later), that would be:
- Folding laundry, putting dishes in the dishwasher, cleaning countertops, tidying up the place... Chores-type tasks
- Service robot bringing you food and drinks
- Cooking. This one will come once it's safe enough, you want to be careful especially when there's heat involved, or liquids.
Sky is the limit for this technology, but the bottleneck is data. The more data there is, the faster it will learn and the more complex the tasks. We can't promise all of these are possible now, but it will get there faster than people think. You can look at research papers from our labs, like Universal Manipulation Interface or ALOHA, for existing physical use-cases.
