Big tech throws money and talent at robots for the home
AMAZON, ALPHABET, HUAWEI, APPLE AND MANY MORE ARE ALL BELIEVED TO BE IN ON THE GAME
Science fiction writers and technologists have been predicting the arrival of robot butlers for the better part of a century. So far domestic robots have been relatively pedestrian: robot dogs, vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers. Rosie of The Jetsons fame? Not so much. That may be about to change.
Behind the scenes, big tech companies are funding secret projects to develop robots. Amazon.com Inc has been working on a robot version of its Echo voiceactivated speaker for a while now and this year began throwing more money and people at the effort. Alphabet Inc is also working on robots, and smartphone maker Huawei Technologies Inc is building a model for the Chinese market that will teach kids to speak English.
None of these bots are capable of organising your closet or mixing cocktails, but advances in artificial intelligence, processors and computer vision mean that simpler machines could start appearing in the next two years, according to people familiar with the companies’ stealth programmes.
“Robots are the next big thing,” said Gene Munster, cofounder of Loup Ventures, who expects the US market for home robots to quadruple to more than $4 billion by 2025. “You know it will be a big deal because the companies with the biggest balance sheets are entering the game.”
IRobot Corp’s Roomba is the most successful, having sold more than 20 million units since 2002, but it currently only does one thing: vacuum. The company’s shares fell as much as 3.3 per cent on Tuesday on the news about increased competition in the home robot space.
More recently, Sony Corp and LG Electronics Inc have shown interest in the category.
Amazon’s Project Vesta is overseen by Gregg Zehr, a veteran executive and a key leader at the company’s Lab126 hardware division. Kenneth Kiraly, who helped develop the Kindle, helps run the show and has about doubled his team of engineers and developers to roughly 500 since the beginning of the year, according to people familiar with the effort.
Top priority
Now a top priority, Project Vesta has expanded from a single floor at the main Lab126 R&D office in Sunnyvale, California, to a larger, more secure facility, the people said. Amazon has moved people from other projects to the Vesta effort and cancelled or pushed back other initiatives, they said.
The gadget will likely leverage some of the technology Amazon has used to build its Kiva warehouse robots, one of the people said. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.
Until recently, Alphabet had the grandest ambitions in robotics. Alphabet’s X division is working on several robotics projects and underlying technology that could, theoretically, make its way to a Jetsons-style home robot. A spokeswoman for the X unit said the company is “optimistic that robotics combined with machine learning can help solve some of humanity’s biggest problems”.
Industry experts say Apple probably isn’t currently working on a domestic bot, preferring to focus on commercial machines. In recent months, the company ramped up hiring of robotics experts with a likely focus on automating the manufacturing of future products. “I don’t think Apple will come out with a consumer-facing robot any time soon,” Munster said.
The robot most akin to the vision big tech is pursuing is probably the Temi, a $1,500 machine that follows its owner from room to room, placing video calls, controlling smart-home devices and other tasks. Temi, the firm, said it will begin shipping the bot by end of year and hopes to build as many as 30,000 units a month.
Charlie Duncheon, a respected robotics and automation expert who once ran robot maker Grabit, said Amazon has an advantage because it can combine the navigation attributes of the Kiva robots scurrying around its warehouses with the voiceactivated smarts of Alexa.
But to really change the world, Duncheon said, Amazon and its rivals will have to master articulated arms and hands that can grip objects. Such technology exists and is getting better all the time, but getting the costs low enough for a mass consumer market will take several years.