![]() “We were making progress on the home but not as fast and not as clearly as when we move to the grocery store,” the executive explains. But when goals are more abstract, as is the case with TRI and fellow research wings, how does a company measure relevant milestones? It’s an admirable goal, certainly, especially as companies like Google and Amazon are in the midst of layoffs numbering in the tens of thousands. Toyota is well-known in the industry for its “no layoffs” policy. The second is to use those times to invest in maintenance, plans and education to help people get trained. One is shared sacrifice, where people take up the cause. You may know that the history of Toyota is to try not to lay people off when times are tough, but instead go through a couple of things. The car business is one that has booms and busts all the time. Toyota is a company that has tried very hard not to have employment follow business cycle. When I put the question to Gill Pratt yesterday, the TRI boss told me: It’s certainly one that’s top of mind, however, as large corporations have begun cutting roles in longtail research projects that have yet to deliver tangible, monetizable results. What, precisely, constitutes progress for a team of this nature is a difficult question to answer. In this instance, some of the learnings presented in this setting do translate to Toyota’s broader needs. The grocery market is a very good representation because it has that huge diversity.” ![]() We like the home because it is representative of where we eventually want to be helping people in the home. “The DARPA Robotics Challenges, those were just made up tasks that were hard. “To be totally honest, the challenge problem kind of doesn’t matter,” Bajracharya explains. In testing the product, the team has moved from Airbnbs to a local mom-and-pop grocery store. Moving into the supermarket was an effort to address a more structured environment while still tackling a pressing issue for the elderly community. But if we did, we would overfit to that home.” We were deploying into Airbnbs to see how well we were doing, but the problem is we couldn’t get the same home every time. We would put things throughout the house to make the robot tidy. We would put flour and rice on the tables and we would try to wipe them up. It was that it was too hard to measure the progress we were making. The problem with the home is not that it was too hard. “We pick challenge tasks because they are hard. It goes unacknowledged for the duration of the demos, but the system will look familiar to anyone who has watched the team’s early concept videos. ![]() A quasi-humanoid robot hangs down, immobile and lifeless. To the side of both robots is a mock kitchen, with a gantry system configured to the top of its walls. As such, many Japanese roboticists have turned to robotics and automation to address issues like at-home healthcare, food preparation and even loneliness. That’s obviously the most sensationalistic of “solutions,” but it’s still an issue in search of meaningful solution. It’s the kind of thing that gets Yale assistant professors New York Times headlines for suggesting mass suicide. In a world where our health and wellness are so closely tied to our ability to work, it’s an issue bordering on crisis. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of citizens over the age of 65 - trailing only Monaco, a microstate in Western Europe with a population of fewer than 40,000. That’s driven, in no small part, by it choosing eldercare as a “north star” for the same reason that Japanese firms are so far ahead of the rest of the world in the category. TRI’s robotics team has long made the home a primary focus. Beyond the robotic vacuum, there’s been little in the way of breakthrough. ![]() Generations of roboticists have agreed that there are plenty of problems waiting to be automated, but thus far, successes have been limited. The lack of success in the category hasn’t been for lack of trying. In the case of TRI’s in-house robotics team, the impossible task is the home. The smartest people in the room can tell you a million times over why a specific issue hasn’t been solved, but it’s still easy to convince yourself that this time - with the right people and the right tools - things will just be different. But there’s also a grand, inevitable tradition of relearning mistakes. Oh, okay, maybe that was harder than we thought.”Īmbition is, of course, an important aspect of this work. Oh, we got machine learning and now you know we can do this. “I think I’m probably just as guilty as everybody else,” Toyota Research Institute’s (TRI) senior vice president of robotics, Max Bajracharya, admits. ![]()
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