Unlike other robots, Proxy's battery can be replaced to avoid downtime charging. Cobot declined to say how much it costs to buy or lease a proxy, but mobile robots often cost thousands of dollars a piece.
Robots work alongside humans, taking turns driving and navigating busy places without colliding with anyone. Porter says the idea is to raise the level of robots as AI becomes more capable, allowing more sophisticated manipulation and communication.
Cobot has a version of proxy that will respond to voice commands big language model To parse the statements, says Porter. When an employee says, “Go to Dock 3 and grab a car by the door,” the robot will respond accordingly. The company is also tracking Development of algorithms that allow more sophisticated forms of manipulation,
The proxy may seem remarkably simple at a time when many companies are racing to develop humanoid robots. But Porter says Amazon is working with a startup, Agility Robotics, to test its humanoid robots, but the technology is too expensive and crude to deploy widely, he says. Some humanoids on the market cost tens of thousands of dollars while others cost several hundreds of thousands. But reliability as well as autonomous capabilities vary wildly, making them more expensive to deploy.
“At Amazon, we focused a lot on humanoids,” says Porter. “There are real problems to be solved by something with more human capabilities, but getting to a humanoid is extremely complex. AI, it's not really there yet.”
Instead, proxies can replace more and more small tasks that humans don't want to do as often. Erez Agmony, a general partner at Interwoven Ventures who was involved in bringing the cobot pilot to Maersk, says it has been very promising and has the potential to expand.
“The main reason is their ability to use collaborative robots to support teams without making heavy modifications to the warehouse or existing equipment,” he says. “The team hated pushing carts, which are too heavy, and they welcome robots that can do that.”
Fady Saad, founder of Cybernetics, a Boston-based venture capital firm specializing in robotics, says cobots are pursuing a huge new category of labor that involves moving goods on trolleys that can be tackled using recent robotics advances. . He further said that it is important that the proxy can evolve into something more capable.
“Porter is trying to create a platform that can further evolve into a humanoid,” says Saad. “I think this is the right way.”
Porter isn't the only robotics expert looking at some simpler tasks than humanoids. rodney brooksA leading researcher and co-founder of iRobot, he is now the Chief Technology Officer of Robust.AI, a company that builds collaborative mobile robots capable of helping human pickers inside factories and warehouses.
“There's a real need for factories and warehouses to move things around, but to think that humanoids are going to do that any time soon is just crazy,” Brooks says. “Wheels were invented for a good reason.”
What kinds of small tasks would you like a robot to help you with? Would it make a difference to you if robots were humanoid or not? Write to me at hello@wired.com to let me know.