“Amazon has developed a warehouse robot that can be assigned tasks using plain conversational English (and haul around carts weighing up to 400 kilograms),” which will enable normal people to easily manage it.
That is significant, because these are relatively cheap robots. They probably cost less than $40,000 to produce, although Amazon does not publicly disclose their production cost. Now, people won’t have to use technical commands or very precise language to instruct the robot on what to do, because it can handle ordinary spoken English, and figure out the basics for itself.
Gizmodo reports:
Amazon says that thanks to advances in AI, its next-generation warehouse robot can now be assigned tasks by employees ‘the way they’d communicate with a colleague.’
The company unveiled the latest version of its Proteus robot on Thursday at its Delivering the Future event in London.
Amazon first introduced Proteus back in 2022 as its first fully autonomous mobile robot. It was designed to operate in dock areas and fulfillment centers, carrying carts full of packages that could weigh nearly 400 kilograms (roughly 882 pounds) over long distances.
According to the company, the new Proteus will be able to work across more parts of Amazon’s facilities, anywhere items need to be moved, including transporting containers and delivery sites.
But the biggest upgrade is how employees communicate with it. Instead of using technical commands or a programming interface, workers will be able to assign Proteus tasks in plain conversational language.
“You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing,” says Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics. “It becomes your assistant for material movement.”
The new Proteus robots will soon join the over 1 million robots already used by Amazon.
Rented robots are doing “the worst jobs,” helping factories keep their human employees, reports the New York Times.
Japan is turning to robots to care for its elderly as its birth rate shrinks. “With around a third of its population over the age of 65, Japan is increasingly turning to robots to care for its elderly citizens. New research suggests that this isn’t as dystopian as it sounds. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which surveyed robot adoption in Japanese nursing homes, found that the machines are associated with improvements in both the quality and productivity of elder care,” says the Cato Institute. Robots improve care in the nursing homes, and also improve the productivity of the humans working in them.
Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms. On some American farms, there are drones with artificial intelligence, and robots that use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour. Scientists have developed tiny robots to repair damaged cells, and nanorobots to destroy cancerous tumors.
German robots hunted the North Sea for tens of thousands of unexploded World War II bombs.
Doctors used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery.
