Once upon a time, robots were largely confined to factory cages, with human interaction kept to a minimum. Today, they are moving into shared spaces from warehouses, hospitals, laboratories and construction sites to museums, restaurants and public roads. At the same time, the commercialization of robotics and physical AI is accelerating.
In this new monthly series, we’ll look at a selection of robotics stories from society, business, research, and culture, as we track the field’s ongoing journey from specialized industrial machines to an increasingly visible social phenomenon.
Sporting robots
April’s most eye-catching robotics stories came from the world of sport.
Pulling no punches with its title -“Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot”- a paper in Nature unveiled ‘Ace’, the “first real-world autonomous system competitive with elite human table tennis players.”
It’s one thing for AI to beat humans at chess and Go, but real-time sports require physical AI systems that can handle “fast, precise and adversarial interactions near obstacles and at the edge of human reaction time.” Table tennis provides all those conditions.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrGq8ltb-_E
Ace combines a high-speed perception system, an AI-based control system, and a high-speed, 8-joint robot arm. Ace won three out of its five matches against elite players but lost 2-1 overall against professional players.
The language of victory becomes a little uncanny in this context. A robot may outperform a human, but there is nothing existential at stake for the machine: no glow of victory, no personal growth in the face of defeat.
Humans will adapt in interesting ways as robots enter our competitive domains. For example, rather than diminishing human sport, systems like Ace could push athletes to greater sporting heights, something an intriguing line in Nature hints at:
After observing a shot played by Ace, former Olympic table tennis player Kinjiro Nakamura remarked that he never thought it was possible — and that seeing the robot achieve it made him believe humans could as well.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, an autonomous humanoid robot completed a half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. Taken at face value, the robot bettered Jacob Kiplimo’s human world record, but the comparison is less straightforward than it sounds.
Multiple robotics experts have questioned whether the race was more of a PR showcase than an indication of a genuine breakthrough in humanoid robot mobility. Scientific American captured the mood:
The Lightning robot also crashed into a barricade, fell and waited for its handlers to set it upright. The Beijing race offered a vivid snapshot of where humanoid robotics stands. Engineers have gotten much better at building machines that can run long distances without overheating or breaking. Getting them to move through the real world with anything like human judgment is another matter.
Record-breaking industrial robot adoption
Western Europe has reached a record 267 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, as robot density surged in Europe (3%), Asia (11%), and North America (4%) year-on-year, according to the latest numbers from the International Federation of Robotics.
China sits sixth in the global list, with 166 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees. At the same time, China has the largest operational stock of industrial robots in the world with around two million units, ~4.5 times more than Japan, which is home to the world’s second-largest industrial robot base.
Future IFR numbers will reveal how today’s economic uncertainty and rising energy input costs affect industrial automation adoption. Some manufacturers may delay capital expenditure, while others may see automation as a necessity for survival in an increasingly competitive manufacturing environment. Uncertainty could also strengthen interest in robots-as-a-service models.
Construction robots and robot ‘brains’
In investment news, capital continued flowing into hardware and software systems designed to make robots more adaptable in warehouses, factories and construction sites.
Stuttgart, Germany-based Sereact, which specializes in physical AI for warehouse and manufacturing applications, raised a US$110 million Series B round to scale its Cortex 2.0 ‘robotic brain’ and enter the US market.
VIDEO: https://sereact.ai/assets/series-b/Cortexpowered.mp4
And All3 raised a US$25 million seed round to develop AI design software, robotic factories, and its visually stunning All3 Mantis autonomous legged construction robot.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO_w52yuhQM
Jump on Board, Grandma!
The discussion around robot deployments in the world’s warzones has been dominated by the proliferation of weaponized drones. In April, the BBC reported a very different kind of story when a rugged, remotely guided ground robot was used to help an elderly woman escape a village near the frontlines in Ukraine. Fearing that she might be frightened by the robot’s approach, operators tied a sign to the seat that read: “Jump on board, Grandma!”
VIDEO: https://bbc.com/news/videos/cpqpjw1zdvjo
Robot dogs in the gallery
April came to a close with surreal scenes taken from some dystopian Doggy Day Care with the launch of Regular Animals by Beeple, at the Neue Nationalgalerie museum in Berlin, Germany.
The interactive installation features a cast of robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads based on famous people – including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Pablo Picasso – that roam a pen-like enclosure, excreting AI-modified images of their surroundings captured by on-board cameras.
The installation explores how “meaning, authorship, and cultural value are increasingly mediated by invisible technological infrastructures,” with the artist observing:
“Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk own algorithms that control what we see and decide how we see the world. When they want to make a change, they don’t have to lobby the UN, they don’t have to go to congress, they just make a change.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM3M1oAjFnI
Have a robotics story, research paper or topic area you’d like to see covered in a future roundup? Drop us a line at [email protected].
Emmet Cole – Science Communicator
Sabine Hauert – Vice President
IEEE RAS Media Services Board
