Laundry-Sorting Robot Spurs AI Hopes and Fears At Europe's Biggest Tech Event (theguardian.com)
(Friday November 15, 2024 @05:20PM (BeauHD)
from the fork-in-the-road dept.)
- Reference: 0175478651
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/15/2133254/laundry-sorting-robot-spurs-ai-hopes-and-fears-at-europes-biggest-tech-event
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/15/laundry-sorting-robot-digit-web-summit-ai-future
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:
> This year's Web Summit, in Lisbon, was all about artificial intelligence -- and a robot sorting laundry. Digit, a humanoid built by the US firm Agility Robotics, demonstrated how far AI has come in a few years by responding to voice commands -- filtered through Google's Gemini AI model -- to [1]sift through a pile of colored T-shirts and place them in a basket . It wasn't a seamless demonstration but the enthusiastic response, nearly two years on from the launch of ChatGPT, reflected the excitement about all things AI that pervaded Europe's biggest annual tech conference.
>
> [...] Digit is being used in warehouses by GXO, a US logistics company, to lift boxes and place them on conveyor belts. According to the chief executive of Agility Robotics, Peggy Johnson, a new role could be created managing teams of Digits doing physical work. "Employees who were previously doing this physical work, appreciate the fact that they can hand that off to Digit," she said. "Then it allows them to do a number of other things, one of which is to be a robot manager."
"Talk of a bust in the AI boom could not be heard over the shouts of encouragement for Digit as it pondered different shades of garment," reports The Guardian. "Nonetheless, the voices of caution were there, discussing familiar themes such as safety, jobs and the climate, as AI comes to influence a huge range of industries."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/15/laundry-sorting-robot-digit-web-summit-ai-future
> This year's Web Summit, in Lisbon, was all about artificial intelligence -- and a robot sorting laundry. Digit, a humanoid built by the US firm Agility Robotics, demonstrated how far AI has come in a few years by responding to voice commands -- filtered through Google's Gemini AI model -- to [1]sift through a pile of colored T-shirts and place them in a basket . It wasn't a seamless demonstration but the enthusiastic response, nearly two years on from the launch of ChatGPT, reflected the excitement about all things AI that pervaded Europe's biggest annual tech conference.
>
> [...] Digit is being used in warehouses by GXO, a US logistics company, to lift boxes and place them on conveyor belts. According to the chief executive of Agility Robotics, Peggy Johnson, a new role could be created managing teams of Digits doing physical work. "Employees who were previously doing this physical work, appreciate the fact that they can hand that off to Digit," she said. "Then it allows them to do a number of other things, one of which is to be a robot manager."
"Talk of a bust in the AI boom could not be heard over the shouts of encouragement for Digit as it pondered different shades of garment," reports The Guardian. "Nonetheless, the voices of caution were there, discussing familiar themes such as safety, jobs and the climate, as AI comes to influence a huge range of industries."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/15/laundry-sorting-robot-digit-web-summit-ai-future
The New Age Is Upon Us (Score:2)
by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 )
"Laundry-Sorting Robot Spurs AI Hopes and Fears"
What a time to be alive.
Re: (Score:2)
by OrangeTide ( 124937 )
I always imagined a future were we didn't have to wear complicated clothing that needed to be washed. Self washing robes. Or simple nudity in a climate-controlled environment.
This, on the other hand, seems like one of those old-timey illustrations of a future where men would go to a barbershop filled with robotic arms to get a shave with a straight razor. Or a mail carrier would hand-deliver letters to 10th story windows on his flying motorcycle. Just total retro-future type stuff, and that's what a laundry
Or ... (Score:2)
by PPH ( 736903 )
... you could use color fast dyes and wash everything together.
failure to permanently [im]press (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you could build a robot who sorts things by color with Lego Mindstorms in the 1990s. Does it at least, like, fold the t-shirts?
Re: (Score:2)
Fabric is famously hard for robots to deal with. Rigid plastic blocks are pretty much the exact opposite of that. Fabric can be thick, thin, bendy, not bendy, slippery, squishy, elastic, inelastic etc etc. Picking up and folding a thin women's silk blouse is very different from picking up and folding a thick wool russian military winter jacket. Both are fabric, and we both know roughly how they react - but pre LLM how did you quantify that in a way a computer could understand?
Robots sorting laundry