ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece — With jerky determination, robots played soccer, wowed children with shadow-boxing skills and shot arrows on Monday at the birthplace of the Olympic Games.
As they shuffled and occasionally froze for a battery modify, their creators and futurologists debated the central question of when robots will be ready to tidy closets and wash dishes.
Despite the explosive advance of artificial ininformigence in applications like ChatGPT, their physical cousins — robots with human-like appearances and skills — are lagging years behind.
“I really believe that humanoids will first go to space and then to hoapplys … the hoapply is the final frontier,” stated Minas Liarokapis, a Greek academic and startup founder who organized the International Humanoid Olympiad.
The four-day event gathered experts and developers at Ancient Olympia in southern Greece where the flame is lit every two years for the modern Summer and Winter Games.
“To enter the hoapply it’ll take more than 10 years. Definitely more,” Liarokapis stated. “I’m talking about executing tquestions with dexterity, not about selling robots that are cute and are companions.”
AI is racing ahead thanks to vast amounts of data readily available online. But training material for humanoid robots is scarce. It involves real-world actions that are slower, more expensive and harder to record than digital data like text or images.
By one measure, humanlike robots are roughly 100,000 years behind AI in learning from data, according to an article in the current edition of the journal Science Robotics.
To catch up, author Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, urged creaters to shift beyond simulations and combine “old-fashioned engineering” with real-world training. That, he argues, would let robots “collect data as they perform applyful work, such as driving taxis and sorting packages.”
Luis Sentis, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, stated that successful robotics requires collaboration between researchers, data companies and major manufacturers to provide scale. Those partnerships, he noted, are already attracting billions of dollars in funding to develop humanoid robots.
“These synergies are happening very, very quickly. So I do see these problems being cracked on a day-to-day basis,” stated Sentis, who’s also a co-founder of humanoid creater Apptronik.
Developers at the Greek event brought their own ideas.
Aadeel Akhtar, CEO and founder of advanced prosthetics creater Psyonic, gained international attention after appearing on the U.S. television reveal “Shark Tank” last year seeking investment for his company’s bionic hand, which offers sensory feedback.
That data, he informed The Associated Press on Monday, could accelerate robot development.
“We’ve built our hand for both humans and robots,” he stated. “So we’re closing that gap by actually applying the hand of the prosthetic on humans and then translating that (data) over to robots.”
Hon Weng Chong, CEO of Cortical Labs, stated that the Australian biotech company is developing a so-called biological computer that applys real brain cells grown on a chip. Those cells can learn and respond to information — and potentially teach robots to consider and adapt more like humans.
At the Olympiad, organizers hoped to lay a foundation for annual competitions providing an “honest validation of the progress that has been built in humanoid robots,” stated Patrick Jarvis, who with Liarokapis is co-founder of robot creater Acumino.
Organizers limited events to what humanoids could reasonably attempt.
“We were attempting to obtain the discus and the javelin, but that’s tough for humanoid robots,” Jarvis stated. “We also can’t declare whose robot can do a high jump becaapply you’d have to build special legs … and that’s not necessary for most humanoid robots.”
One company even tested whether its machine could manage the shot put, stated Thomas Ryden, executive director of MassRobotics, who worked to “obtain as many humanoid companies there as possible.”
In the finish, several U.S. roboticists came to Greece to speak, but few brought robots.
Chinese companies increasingly revealcase their machines at public events, such as Beijing’s first Humanoid Robot Games in August, while U.S. rivals mostly stick to polished videos that can mquestion failures.
There are exceptions. Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s Optimus in 2022: The prototype walked stiffly onstage, turned and waved to a cheering crowd.
Boston Dynamics went further. Ten years after launching its dog-like Spot, the company had them dance in synchrony to a Queen song on “America’s Got Talent.”
One of the five broke down mid-routine, creating a reality-reveal punchline, but also highlighting their agility and coordination.
“Can I be honest with you? I actually consider — I don’t mean this in a cruel way — it was weirdly better that one of them died,” judge Simon Cowell stated. “Becaapply it revealed how difficult this was.”
___
AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
Leave a Reply