Agility Robotics shared a demo video on Wednesday of one of its Digit robots upgraded with ai. While this may conjure up terrifying pop culture images of intelligent sci-fi machines taking over the world, the demo video reveals something much more vulgar, if not boring. The bipedal warehouse robot works painstakingly to complete a slightly perplexing task without direct human control or detailed guidance. In the clip, he slowly but successfully interprets and executes the command: “Take the color box of Darth Vader's lightsaber and move it to the tallest tower in the first row.”
The company, which added a “head” and “hands” to Digit earlier this year, presents the demo as a showcase of how large language models (LLMs) can enhance its humanoid machines. He suggests it's a natural fit, describing Digit as “a physical embodiment of artificial intelligence.”
“We created a demonstration space with a series of numbered towers of various heights, as well as three boxes with multiple defining characteristics,” Pras Velagapudi, vice president of innovation and chief architect at Agility Robotics, explained in the clip. “Digit was provided with information about this environment, but was not provided with any specific information about its tasks. “Just natural language commands of varying complexity to see if I could execute them.”
The clip shows Digit's internal monologue superimposed on the screen as the robot thinks about the task. For example, “I need to figure out what commands I can use,” “I need to first assess the environment to see what items and locations are available,” and “Darth Vader's lightsaber is red, so the red box (box 2) is “The one I need to move. The tallest tower in the first row is tower 4. I'll move to the location on square 2 first.”
After moving to the red box location, Digit continues. “Now that I'm at the location of box 2, I should pick it up,” she reasons. He continues: “Now that I have square 2, I must move to the location of the highest tower in the first row, which is tower 4” and “Now that I am on tower 4, I must place square 2 on it.” Finally, he declares his work finished: “I believe I have completed the task, as I have moved the box of the color of Darth Vader's lightsaber (red, box2) to the tallest tower in the first row (tower4).”
Agility Robotics, which pitches Digit as a way to spare human workers from the most strenuous physical activities, says it created the demo to “show how LLMs could make our robots more versatile and faster to deploy.” The company is building a factory in Oregon to produce 10,000 humanoid robots a year. Also has inked an agreement with Amazon for the retailer to test Digit in a Seattle-area facility. Fiction-fueled fears aside, robots are far more likely to harm humans by stealing their warehouse jobs than by shape-shifting, murdering innocents, or recreating other Hollywood-fueled dystopian nightmares.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/agilitys-digit-warehouse-robot-understands-natural-language-commands-thanks-to-ai-smarts-214415066.html?src=rss
