Technology
Toyota's robot butler concept hangs like a bat from the ceiling
The population of the Planet is steadily ageing, with people aged 65 and over making up the fastest-growing demographic group in the world. This would cause challenges for many nations as they try to find money to look after seniors. And that's why Toyota's robotics division works on designing mechanical home helpers, keeping aging generations safe and comfortable as they age.
This week, Toyota gave a closer look at some of the concepts it's exploring in a mock-up home setting designed in its California laboratories. This involve a "Gantry Robot" that hangs from the ceiling and is capable of performing tasks such as washing and filling the dishwasher.
Toyota claims that the robot 's architecture was influenced by visits to Japanese homes, where researchers noticed that small floor space would constrain the robot's ability to support. The answer was to envision a futuristic home designed with robotics specifically incorporated into the design. Creating new robot-assisted homes from scratch will, of course, produce its own problems, but the concept itself solves a variety of problems.
What if instead of having a robot to traverse the cluttered board, it could instead fly to the ceiling and be tucked out of the way when it isn't needed? Dan Helmick, co-leader of the robotics fleet at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), said during a simulated presentation. The TRI was first founded in 2015 with an investment of $1 billion.
In addition to the gantry robot, TRI also demoted a soft bubble grip that uses air-filled cushions to softly grasp a variety of items, and a floor-based mobile robot with the same basic functionality as its bat-like partner. Researchers at the Institute have also seen how they use augmented reality to train these robots. Humans execute the desired behavior, such as wiping down a tabletop, using VR devices, and these gestures are then encoded into robots. A variety of robotic firms use identical methods to address the difficulties of programming human motions in robots.
These bots, though, are just experiments, and Toyota has no imminent plans to commercialize the device. The robots you see today are prototypes to improve our study, but they won't be transformed into devices any time soon, said Max Bajracharya, TRI Vice President of Robotics, according to a study by TechRepublic.
Toyota is only one of the organizations designing home robotics, but the sector remains incredibly challenging. Although several laboratories have built robots that can conduct household chores in the lab, it has proved difficult to pass those abilities to real homes, where not every part of even basic tasks can be calculated, modeled, and projected.
Still, Toyota 's approach is reassuringly empathetic, with the lab focussing on working on the desires and desires of humans, not pressuring them. As TRI CEO Gill Pratt said to IEEE Spectrum, the concept is to amplify, rather than reduce, human potential. It involves creating infrastructure that allows us to continue living and working and to connect to each other as if we were younger, Pratt said.
