Companies are racing to make AI-fueled robots for everyday life

NANCY: Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and engineering have the potential to change the world in many ways, from health care to disaster response. And now there’s a push from companies racing to be first to introduce AI-powered robots into our everyday lives.

With proponents like Tesla CEO Elon Musk saying there could be billions of humanoid bots roaming the earth by 2040 and costs falling, the market looks set to explode.

At the International Conference on Humanoid Robotics in Nancy, France, more than two dozen companies alongside research institutions are showcasing their latest machines. Serena Ivaldi, the Director of Research at the Inria Centre at the University of Lorraine, said “In the last year there has been a revolution in the actuation and in some mechatronics components. And so the robots now are more robust and more efficient, more performing. And also the cost has decreased, which enables more companies, more labs to produce new prototypes.”

Ivaldi says that cheaper engineering costs have allowed a rise in startups developing robotics.

While engineers design the machines to mimic human form and movement, AI provides the brainpower, helping the robots to learn from their environment, make decisions and perform complex tasks.

Ivaldi also says new AI methods that incorporate image and language processing will make the machines more useful.

“Right now in the AI domain, there is a lot of work that is done with the pre-trained models that start from a lot of example, a lot of demonstrations. But I think it’s not that far at the moment where the AI methods will exhibit the generalization capacity that enables the robot to do new stuff that is explained on the fly without having demonstrations.”

Companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia have already invested billions in adopting AI.

According to venture capital firm Accel, funding of AI and cloud companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel is estimated to hit nearly $80 billion by the end of 2024.

But as some robots showed off their skills at the conference, Agnieszka Wykowska from the Italian Institute of Technology warned that we are still away from seeing the sorts of robots we’d recognize from science fiction.

She said, “I guess at this moment, as what I just mentioned, is being naturally in real time able to respond to the environment, to the human and act in complex environments like home, for example, or clinical setting, like where we are. So I think this is still a big challenge and we’re very far away from making robots fully autonomous to be able to interact with humans in such a way.”

Also read: Meta, Google call for Australian govt to delay under-16s social media ban