Toyota Research Institute’s robots leave home

I think I’m probably just as guilty as everybody else,” Toyota Research Institute’s (TRI) senior vice president of robotics, Max Bajracharya, admits. “It’s like, now our GPUs are better. Oh, we got machine learning and now you know we can do this. Oh, okay, maybe that was harder than we thought.”

Ambition is, of course, an important aspect of this work. But there’s also a grand, inevitable tradition of relearning mistakes. The smartest people in the room can tell you a million times over why a specific issue hasn’t been solved, but it’s still easy to convince yourself that this time — with the right people and the right tools — things will just be different.

 

In the case of TRI’s in-house robotics team, the impossible task is the home. The lack of success in the category hasn’t been for lack of trying. Generations of roboticists have agreed that there are plenty of problems waiting to be automated, but thus far, successes have been limited. Beyond the robotic vacuum, there’s been little in the way of breakthrough.

TRI’s robotics team has long made the home a primary focus. That’s driven, in no small part, by it choosing eldercare as a “north star” for the same reason that Japanese firms are so far ahead of the rest of the world in the category. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of citizens over the age of 65 — trailing only Monaco, a microstate in Western Europe with a population of fewer than 40,000.

In a world where our health and wellness are so closely tied to our ability to work, it’s an issue bordering on crisis. It’s the kind of thing that gets Yale assistant professors New York Times headlines for suggesting mass suicide. That’s obviously the most sensationalistic of “solutions,” but it’s still an issue in search of meaningful solution. As such, many Japanese roboticists have turned to robotics and automation to address issues like at-home healthcare, food preparation and even loneliness.

Read here : https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/16/toyota-research-institutes-robots-leave-home/