Skip to main content

Robots everywhere: Army of single-purpose ‘bots get household chores done

For decades, science fiction has been promising a future filled with robots performing all of our mundane daily tasks for us. From Rosie the maid on The Jetsons to C-3PO in the Star Wars films, we’ve all pictured a day when we won’t have to lift a finger, but instead are surrounded by all manner of cyborg butlers and servants to do the things around the house we don’t want to do ourselves.

Unfortunately, we still don’t live in the age of the one-size-fits-all robot servant. Instead, we have a smaller army of single-purpose robotic aids that can perform all sorts of specific tasks, from vacuuming our floors to mowing our lawns. But even those are still fairly basic. The problem is that even the most mundane household task, from dishwashing to taking out the trash, contains myriad individual tasks that today’s robots simply can’t handle.

The problem is that while household chores are fairly easy for us humans, they still require a ton of little skills like spatial reasoning and fine motor control, which takes extremely advanced programming. Think about making coffee, for example. How would you program a robot to do that? The act of making coffee may be simple, but programming a machine to understand what a kitchen is, the difference between appliances, where the coffee is stored in the cupboard, grabbing and scooping out the coffee — it all is wildly complex from a programming standpoint.

While we already have robotic vacuums, mops, mowers, window cleaners, sanitizers, and more, none of them have quite reached the heights of those promised movie robots; instead, we have multiple robots that serve specific purposes. But here’s the exiting part: With the advancement of A.I., we can program those individual robots to work together. With the advent of voice assistants like Alexa, we can now control the individual robots through one robot, creating a single point to guide the tiny army of individual robots around the house to complete the tasks instead of waiting for that futuristic robot butler. The homes of the future won’t have one butler ‘bot, but will instead have robots everywhere.

For more Robots Everywhere check out the series on YouTube. Also read about the Aigency, a robot talent agency!

Editors' Recommendations

Todd Werkhoven
Todd Werkhoven's work can be read at numerous publications and he co-authored a personal finance book called "Zombie…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more