A Peek Inside Google’s Efforts to Create a General-Purpose Robot

bloomberg.com

39 points·mortenjorck··5 comments

This article is virtually content-free. "Google are building robots. They've hired some people. Those robots may or may not be grabbing objects."

It's handy knowing they're fiddling with ROS, and the research papers show use of DNN&RL for robotics via simulated tasks with actions keying off of raw pixel inputs (paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.02971v1.pdf), and grasp paper shows ambitions on dexterous manipulation. I think valuable to have some idea of the research areas. I'm biased because I wrote the article, though! Aiming to produce a more granular article as soon as I can report it out.

Sorry to be a hater. I think the average HN reader knows a lot more about this than the average Bloomberg reader.

After 10-15 years of incremental improvements in web & mobile apps, I have started feeling that technology has finally started to try to solve real problems. General purpose robots, self driving cars, internet of things, virtual / augmented reality, etc are all very interesting! The kinds of things that people in 70s & 80s would think we'd have in 2010s. I'm getting excited about future again!

I'm always happy to hear of any scraps that leak out of Google's robotics/AI divisions. There is no certainty that we'll see human level AI in our lifetime, but I am pretty confident we'll see machines master the basic physical world- Anything from cleaning to building houses to driving etc etc will be possible with only limited human intervention.

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