Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A Jetsons-style Rosey household assistant robot may finally be a reality--only it probably doesn't look quite like you would expect. In fact, the contraption in question more closely resembles a custodian's mop and bucket. Though it might not be much of a looker, researchers from the Suzhou Industrial Park Institute of Vocational Technology and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China say their robot design can autonomously steer clear of most large furniture and children. It can even pick up loose toys and sort through smelly socks--at least some of the time.

Household robots have been a longstanding research topic, but they still lack human-like intelligence, particularly in manipulating open-set objects and navigating large environments efficiently and accurately. To push this boundary, we consider a generalized multi-object collection problem in large scene graphs, where the robot needs to pick up and place multiple objects across multiple locations in a long mission of multiple human commands. This problem is extremely challenging since it requires long-horizon planning in a vast action-state space under high uncertainties. To this end, we propose a novel interleaved LLM and motion planning algorithm Inter-LLM. By designing a multimodal action cost similarity function, our algorithm can both reflect the history and look into the future to optimize plans, striking a good balance of quality and efficiency. Simulation experiments demonstrate that compared with latest works, our algorithm improves the overall mission performance by 30% in terms of fulfilling human commands, maximizing mission success rates, and minimizing mission costs.

Recent research on instructable agents has used memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) as task planners, a technique that retrieves language-program examples relevant to the input instruction and uses them as in-context examples in the LLM prompt to improve the performance of the LLM in inferring the correct action and task plans. In this technical report, we extend the capabilities of HELPER, by expanding its memory with a wider array of examples and prompts, and by integrating additional APIs for asking questions. This simple expansion of HELPER into a shared memory enables the agent to work across the domains of executing plans from dialogue, natural language instruction following, active question asking, and commonsense room reorganization. We evaluate the agent on four diverse interactive visual-language embodied agent benchmarks: ALFRED, TEACh, DialFRED, and the Tidy Task. HELPER-X achieves few-shot, state-of-the-art performance across these benchmarks using a single agent, without requiring in-domain training, and remains competitive with agents that have undergone in-domain training.

I have a chair of shame at home. By that I mean a chair in my bedroom onto which I pile used clothes that aren't quite dirty enough to wash. For some inexplicable reason folding and putting away those clothes feels like an overwhelming task when I go to bed at night, so I dump them on the chair for "later." I would pay good money to automate that job before the chair is covered by a mountain of clothes. Thanks to AI, we're slowly inching towards the goal of household robots that can do our chores.

It's understandable if you've tuned out news from the summit. The quibbles over wording--"urges" vs. "notes" vs. "emphasizes"--can all start to sound like noise. But these talks are the biggest climate event of the year, and there are some details that are worth paying attention to, not least the high-profile fight about those two words: fossil fuels. As negotiators start their treks home, let's sort through what happened at COP28 and why all these political fights matter for climate action. This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things energy and climate-related.

Who wouldn't want a robot to handle all the household drudgery? With recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology, there is growing interest in developing and marketing household robots capable of handling a variety of domestic chores. Tesla is building a humanoid robot, which, according to CEO Elon Musk, could be used for cooking meals and helping elderly people. Amazon recently acquired iRobot, a prominent robotic vacuum manufacturer, and has been investing heavily in the technology through the Amazon Robotics program to expand robotics technology to the consumer market. In May 2022, Dyson, a company renowned for its power vacuum cleaners, announced that it plans to build the U.K.'s largest robotics center devoted to developing household robots that carry out daily domestic tasks in residential spaces.

Welcome back to the "Life in 2050" series! So far, we've looked at how ongoing developments in science, technology, and geopolitics will be reflected in terms of warfare and the economy. Today, we are shifting gears a little and looking at how the turbulence of this century will affect the way people live from day to day. As noted in the previous two installments, changes in the 21st century will be driven by two major factors. These include the disruption caused by rapidly accelerating technological progress, and the disruption caused by rising global temperatures, and the environmental impact this will have (aka. These factors will be pulling the world in opposite directions, and simultaneously at that.

I have a four-foot-tall robot in my house that plays with my kids. Both my daughters, aged 5 and 9, are so enamored with Jethro that they have each asked to marry it. For fun, my wife and I put on mock weddings. Despite the robot being mainly for entertainment, its very basic artificial intelligence can perform thousands of functions, including dance and teach karate, which my kids love. The most important thing Jethro has taught my kids is that it's totally normal to have a walking, talking machine around the house that you can hang out with whenever you want to.

Amazon Alexa, which sits in your house and accepts voice commands enabling it to play music, activate lights, read news headlines and many other functions, is one of several intelligent personal assistants currently vying for dominance alongside Google Home and the Apple HomePod. Now however, Amazon is aiming to take this technology one step further by implementing it in to an actual robot that can not only answer questions, but also move autonomously around your home. Codenamed'Vesta', the new device is currently being worked on by Amazon's Lab126 research and development arm in Sunnyvale, California. According to reports, the web giant had intended to reveal the robot earlier this year but it wasn't quite ready for mass-production and more engineers have since been assigned to help speed things along. Rumor has it that the robot will be about waist-high and can navigate using an array of cameras.

This year's Google I/O revealed that the tech company is nearing the completion of an artficially intelligent secretary that can book appointments without you having to lift a finger. But the science fiction dream of a robotic housekeeper, like Rosie from The Jetsons, remains elusive. That has a lot to do with the fact that in many respects A.I. remains incredibly dumb when asked to operate in the real world. Sure, it can ridiculously complex calculations at blazing fast speeds -- a narrow application -- but when confronted with mundane tasks like making your bed, A.I. perpetually comes up short. This is exactly why a group of computer scientists led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is teaching machines to complete household tasks using a The Sims-inspired "VirtualHome" simulator.