Stop being afraid of robots. They're here to make you smarter

Speaker 1: A lot of what you, and I think we know about the future of robotics is either still very much T B D or just playing wrong. Let's take a look at a place in Silicon valley where they're sorting it all out for our future. This is Toyota research Institute headquarters. We're in Silicon valley, Los Altos. [00:00:30] Yep. California. That's. That's what happens Speaker 2: Here that people here are passionate about taking robotics technology and having a real impact on people, on society, making robots truly useful to people Speaker 1: To see that we got exclusive access to Toyota research Institute where max buzz aria leads the T I robotics team and showed me a few of their new breakthroughs, like soft bubble gripper technology to create a robot that isn't all [00:01:00] hard edges and hard for, but can soft sense things like we do, allowing it to pick things up without damaging them or bump into you without damaging you. Well, what Speaker 2: If you put some softness around the whole robot, you know, think of our, you know, our, our skin is a little bit soft and what if you actually add sensing to that replicating our body is incredibly cut. If you think about how many sensors we have and all of that data getting sent up into some processing unit, that's one of the really big challenges, [00:01:30] or Speaker 1: How about the diabolical chaos? That is the grocery shelf, clear plastic packages that appear not to be there to a robot or shiny things that reflect back a confounding image. DRI has found ways to let their robots handle such optical trickery the same way we figure it Speaker 2: Out. We don't think twice about understanding transparent objects that we can actually see right through them. Um, and that our eyes still can figure out what is the depth on that thing that we just saw through what [00:02:00] our systems are actually able to do now, um, you using a lot of data and, uh, machine learning is they're actually able to use context to understand the, what they're looking at in a much more fundamental way. Okay. We're looking at the insides of some of the parts of the it's a lot Speaker 1: Like Wally, I think you know that. Yep. Right? Okay. This land, all right. What you can't see in this tr I robot is something that [00:02:30] they call IA sort of turning AI on its head. It stands for intelligence amplification amplifying our intelligence instead of the artificial intelligence that most of us assume is what robots will use to displace us Speaker 2: Intelligence amplification. You just amplification in general of people. Our goal is really not to replace people. What you don't see today is humans and robots really interacting together. And that really limits how much robots [00:03:00] can really amplify people's ability. Now Speaker 1: You might think a lot of these hurdles can be solved by having humans just remotely operate robots. Max and his team have found that that approach is often more work than it's worth. Speaker 2: It's incredibly high cognitive load. Um, if you think of that on me, on my, on humans. Yes. Yeah. So what are you gonna do Speaker 1: To make that, not be the case to take the cognitive load and make it light and bright for me? So I'm like super powerful through Speaker 2: A robot. You, as a human are in understanding everything about the context of, of the scene and you're telling the [00:03:30] robot everything, how to move, what to do. But if the robot has some understanding of what it's looking at, then all you need to do is give it sort of high level direction. You know, I'll pick that, pick that thing, you know, like, you know, put this over there. If you are doing that, then that more of a Speaker 1: Command than an actual Speaker 2: Execution. Exactly. That's, what's missing this, this robot is capable of doing physically capable of doing many of those tasks. Yeah. It's not smart enough. Speaker 1: The T I robotics team doesn't develop end products. They do core research [00:04:00] and they open source a lot of what they learn by the way where you will see a lot of this work in reality is at Toyota's woven city where other parts of Toyota and their partners will take. What's learned here and build it into reality. There.