NVIDIA opened an AI Robotics Research Lab in Seattle in November and put Dieter Fox in charge, with the lab's main project teaching a robotic arm to work in an Ikea kitchen. The company says the effort is a step toward robots that can operate alongside people in everyday settings.
The lab already has about a dozen projects in the works, but the kitchen task is the centerpiece. For now, the robot is limited to fetching items from counters and placing them in drawers. The source describes the eventual curriculum as potentially including tasks such as loading a dishwasher or cooking a meal.
Fox, who heads the lab, framed the work in broader terms. "We want to develop robots that can naturally perform tasks alongside people," he said in a news release. "To do that, they need to be able to understand what a person wants to do and figure out how to help her achieve a goal."
The kitchen setting is not the end goal, according to Fox. "All of this is working toward enabling the next generation of smart manipulators that can also operate in open-ended environments where not everything is designed specifically for them," he said. "By pulling together recent advances in perception, control, learning, and simulation, we can help the research community solve some of the greatest challenges in robotics."
Fox describes cobots — short for collaborative robots — as a fixture of the future, operating as coworkers, companions, and caretakers. The Seattle lab's kitchen project is an early test of whether a robot can understand a person's intent and act on it in a space built for humans.
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