I don't know whether to be impressed, terrified or skeptical. This is startup Astribot's eponymous robot competently performing domestic tasks: Tidying up a worksurface, preparing food, vacuuming, ironing, folding clothes, etc., purportedly without being teleoperated:
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My kneejerk skepticism is probably because I don't want to believe these kinds of strides have been made, this quickly. And I'd never heard of this company, which hails from Shenzhen. Then again, just a few years ago I'd never heard of BYD, and now they're poised to outsell Tesla.
At press time, the company has released virtually no info about the robot aside from the video. And based on the footage, we assume it's currently an upper-body creation only.
Astribot's video is perhaps a response to competitior Sanctuary AI's video from a few weeks ago. Sanctuary's update shows their 'bot doing fewer tabletop tasks, but with more fluidity, and also reportedly autonomously:
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They’ve been hawking the “ more leisure time with automation” since the 50’s.
It is indeed very impressive looking but I'd be very skeptical of what we're seeing because we have no idea what amount of training and set up was required for this demo. If I gave it a slightly different sized bottle would it perform as flawlessly? If the vacuum was a different design would it be able to do it the same? If achieving these tasks require hours of training and then when one variable changes it needs to be retrained to handle this varied situation, it obviously isn't going to be as useful as it seems.
Why do any of these operations require autonomous mechanization? What is the benefit of a $10k anthropomorphic robot over a less general purpose unit?
*more general purpose