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Toyota's Robots Are Learning to Do Housework—By Copying Humans

Carmaker Toyota is developing robots capable of learning to do household chores by observing how humans take on the tasks. The project is an example of robotics getting a boost from generative AI.

As someone who quite enjoys the Zen of tidying up, I was only too happy to grab a dustpan and brush and sweep up some beans spilled on a tabletop while visiting the Toyota Research Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts last year. Having robots learn to do things for themselves has proven challenging because of the complexity and variability of the physical world and human environments, and the difficulty of obtaining enough training data to teach them to cope with all eventualities. The sweeping robot I trained uses a machine-learning system called a diffusion policy, similar to the ones that power some AI image generators, to come up with the right action to take next in a fraction of a second, based on the many possibilities and multiple sources of data.

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