Silent. Rigid. Clumsy. Henry and Jane Evans are used to awkward houseguests. For more than a decade, the couple, who live in Los Altos Hills, California, have hosted a slew of robots in their home. In 2002, at age 40, Henry had a massive stroke, which left him with quadriplegia and an inability to speak. Since then, he’s learned how to communicate by moving his eyes over a letter board, but he is highly reliant on caregivers and his wife, Jane. Henry got a glimmer of a different kind of life when he saw Charlie Kemp on CNN in 2010. Kemp, a robotics professor at Georgia Tech, was on TV talking about PR2, a robot developed by the company Willow Garage. PR2 was a massive two-armed machine on wheels that looked like a crude metal butler. Kemp was demonstrating how the robot worked, and talking about his research on how health-care robots could help people. He showed how the PR2 robot could hand some medicine to the television host. “All of a sudden, Henry turns to me and says, ‘Why can’t that robot be an extension of my body?’ And I said, ‘Why not?’” Jane says. There was a solid reason why not. While engineers have made great progress in getting robots to work in tightly controlled environments like labs and factories, the home has proved difficult to design for. Out in the real, messy world, furniture and floor plans differ wildly; children and pets can jump in a robot’s way; and clothes that need folding come in different shapes, colors, and sizes. Managing such unpredictable settings and varied conditions has been beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced robot prototypes.
Full commentary : Researchers are using generative AI and other techniques to teach robots new skills—including tasks they could perform in homes.
