Atlas robot learns how to do chores

18th January 2016

Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC)

Enaie Azambuja

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Atlas, designed and operated by the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), recently came second place at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, an annual competition that puts robots to the test in categories including stair climbing, door opening, rubble traversing and vehicle driving and dismounting. As you might have guessed, Atlas is good at practicing the same tasks over and over again.

So now, seemingly for some variety, the team at the IHMC has decided to put its household chore chops to the test.

Controlled by John Carff, robot operator at IHMC, Atlas was able to sweep the floor, use a pallet jack and move a vacuum cleaner.

"Most of the stuff in the video is controlled by me, but in a co-active way," Carff told IEEE. "I'm not sitting there with a joystick tele-operating the robot -- I tell the robot through the UI that I want to grab a bottle off the table by clicking the bottle and making sure the hand is in the correct place. Then the robot tells me how it's going to move its entire body to reach that location through a preview in the UI, and if I'm okay with the plan the robot has come up with I tell it to execute that motion."

Sadly, that means a human has to be in control most of the time.

"In the future, I can see a lot of this moving more to the autonomous side, but I always see there being a human in the loop".

If you're totally sold on the robot butler idea, however, you're out of luck. Not only is the video is 20x normal speed, making Atlas a not particularly efficient helper, but the tests were undertaken purely to ensure new code updates work. According to John Carff, IHMC have no plans to "announce the availability of that robot butler you've always wanted" -- so now you have no excuse not to get on with your hoovering.