[xg15]

> If you want a robot that can fold your laundry, clean your room and cook, you need a lot more than cheap hardware. You need an autonomous agent (i.e. "an AI") that can guide the hardware to accomplish the task.

Yes, that's my point. Cheap hardware is far harder to control than expensive hardware, so if Google actually developed some AI that can do high-precision tasks on "wobbly", off-the-shelf hardware, that would be the breakthrough.

I agree that extensive training for each single device would be prohibitive, but that feels like a problem that could be solved with more development: With many machine learning tasks, we started with individual training a model for each specific use case and environment. Today we're able to make generalized model which are trained once and can be deployed in a wide variety of environments. I don't see why this shouldn't be possible for a vision-based robot controller either.

Managing the actual high-level task is easy as soon as you're able to do all the low-level tasks: I.e., converting a recipe into a machine-readable format, dividing it into a tree of tasks and subtasks etc is easy. The hard parts are actually cutting the vegetables, de-boning the meat, etc. The amount of complex movement planning necessary for that doesn't exist yet. But this project looks as if it's a step in exactly that direction.