The world’s first artificial intelligence-driven humanoid labor robot “Phoenix”

It is reported that Canada’s Sanctuary AI company has released a new humanoid robot, aiming to be “the world’s first humanoid intelligent general robot (GPR)”. The robot, called Phoenix, builds on some impressive early work and a neat "pilot" training method.

Above: Sanctuary AI debuts Phoenix, a general-purpose work robot in development.

The humanoid shape is certainly not the most efficient shape for a useful robot, but it is a great shape for a robot designed to take over as many human tasks as possible. The modern world is primarily built for bipeds, who are a certain height, have five fingers and opposable thumbs, so that's the form the GPRs designed by Tesla, OpenAI, Figure, etc. will take.

In fact, Sanctuary already has extensive experience in developing upper-body humanoid robots. Back in March, the company conducted a week-long pilot trial of a waist-up universal robot in a Canadian Tire Corporation store, which the company claimed was able to correctly complete 110 items. Retail-related tasks including picking, packing, cleaning, labeling, labeling, folding and more.

This flexibility is absolutely key to Sanctuary’s vision; these robots will eventually need to be able to do anything a human worker can do. So the company is building them around the training concept pioneered by Kindred. Kindred was an earlier company founded by Sanctuary co-founder Suzanne Gilbert and run by Sanctuary co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose, which was sold to Ocado in 2020.

Essentially, the robot learns each task through telepresence. A human operator wears a virtual reality helmet and is connected to a motion capture device to see what the robot sees through the camera system and feel what the robot "feels" through sensors. The operator's movements control the robot, while the robot's artificial intelligence system observes, senses and learns.

When the AI ​​recognizes movement patterns, it starts building a list of task-relevant actions and at a certain point is ready to autonomously take over a given task. In the case of Canadian Tire's pilot program, pre-training took place at Sanctuary headquarters in a lab designed to accurately recreate the work environment at the tire company's stores.

However, telepresence technology is equally happy to run over a remote internet connection, and the wording of the company's press release doesn't specify that everything (or anything) that happens onsite is done autonomously. Unfortunately, Sanctuary's pilot learning technology means that when robots demonstrate their abilities in many of the company's videos, viewers can't tell whether they're acting autonomously or via telepresence.

In April, the company admitted in a blog post titled "Integrity in Technical Communication, Marketing, and Storytelling" that "in most of the 'robots doing' videos we publish, the robots are represented by It is operated remotely.”

So while these videos are great demonstrations of what the hardware is capable of across a range of different tasks, it's hard to say what's really important - the AI ​​software and its ability to simulate tasks in a flexible and useful way. ability.

Still, the company continued its efforts and secured the lower half of the robot. The new Phoenix GPR is 170 centimeters (5.57 feet) tall and weighs 70 kilograms (155 pounds). It can carry a payload of up to 25 kilograms (55 pounds), and its hands are works of art with 20 degrees of freedom, and haptic technology gives it a near-real touch feeling.

It runs on a "cognitive architecture and software platform" called "Carbon", which not only includes pilot learning and reinforcement content, but also incorporates large-scale language model artificial intelligence, so it should eventually be able to function like ChatGPT Have conversations and receive natural language instructions.

Sanctuary even says that Carbon can "enable Phoenix to think and act like a human to complete tasks," accomplishing planning, agency and goal-seeking behaviors. This all sounds very far from where we are now; it's one thing for large LLMs like GPT to demonstrate extraordinary control over language, but for similar neural models learning how to achieve physical goals becomes Concrete entities are another matter. But it's definitely coming.

The strange thing is that there is one thing that Phoenix can't do at the moment, and seems to have no plans to learn at the moment, and that is walking. The robot has legs, but Sanctuary puts it on a wheeled platform. According to reports, Sanctuary seems to be very happy with this arrangement until another company can come up with a suitable walking algorithm that can be purchased, licensed or open sourced. in the robot. Until then, it will roll at a top speed of 4.8 km/h (3 mph).

Now, you could argue that this might be a smart business, because the more valuable part of this business is definitely the robot's ability to perform a range of different work tasks. Sanctuary explained in a separate blog post that "as a worker, value is not primarily defined by legs." But it does feel a little strange that a robotics company isn't even interested in the challenge of walking.

Regardless, AI-powered humanoid labor robots are likely to lead the charge in 2023, and the Phoenix robot’s hands alone make it a worthy contender in the field. If this thing could learn to make itself useful, whether it had legs or not, a lot of people would find jobs for it. With more than $100 million in funding, Sanctuary has its chance. This is definitely a dark horse worth keeping an eye on.

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