It’s the weekend of the world-famous CES tradeshow, and we’re seeing some of the fruits of AI get showcased by vendors.
At risk of putting too much of an emphasis on Chinese robotics, it’s notable that the Dreame company is unveiling a new model with some pretty interesting new features, or should I say, limbs.
Yes, this robot vacuum now has small appendages that you can call ‘legs’ – several inches long, that allow the floor-standing unit to lift itself a little up off of ground level.
I watched the preview, and it shows the Dreame X50 Ultra, the company’s new model, navigating some slight inclines and using those small legs to its advantage, as well as utilizing other impressive features that illustrate where we are with this technology. Coverage at The Verge unveils this and other eye-catching designs.
The Evolution of Robot Vacuums
From the first Roombas years ago, robotic vacuums have been designed to better handle a range of tasks.
One prominent example of this is the introduction of lidar into robot vacuum designs.
Yesterday‘s robot vacuums were a lot like those ping animations you see on a screensaver – the unit just went in a mindless line, cleaning surfaces, until it had covered a particular square footage. It wasn’t particularly good at navigating obstacles, or dealing with irregular spaces, or anticipating other kinds of challenges.
When you look at the new demo of the Dreame X50 Ultra, you can see that its lidar allows it to map out a space and actually understand what’s around it. That in turn makes it much more adept at avoiding problems with objects on the floor, or unusual circumstances where things get in the way.
Another new feature is a set of suction apparatus that helps the vacuum to be much more effective in deep cleaning of pet hair and other items from surfaces where they might be deeply ingrained.
Agentic AI for Cleaning
This really hits the idea of an AI agent – instead of a single-use, generic robot floor cleaner. The idea is that this one appliance can sweep-clean a large area while also focusing on specific problem spots where other kinds of cleaning tasks are necessary.
But the legs are important, too.
A Fish on Land
Think about that age-old symbol of evolution: the fish with legs.
Darwin’s theory, and what others suggest, is that over a long period of time, millions of years, perhaps, the fish in its biology was sufficiently altered, by will or habit or happenstance, to be able to push itself onto land, and thereby start building its own appendages for terrestrial transport.
Here the whole thing is happening in months, not years, where humans are endowing their creations with quickly evolving capabilities.
And as my friend Jeremy Wertheimer points out, we are not so much engineering some of this, as we are discovering its potential and capability. We may put these AI entities and robots in place, but we don’t fully govern what they do anymore, not in some very important ways.
I’ll go back to what I wrote about before with robot technologies – the idea that the robots can be subject to jailbreak techniques, where an individual rogue user or bad actor can use them to cause harm or put people in danger.
That in itself speaks to the unpredictability of intelligent systems, especially when they’re connected to advanced robotics. And then there are things like the 2020 “woman on the toilet” pics surfacing in unusual places – as covered at the MIT Technology Review.
That’s not to say that we can’t control these technologies – perhaps we can. And it’s a fascinating look at how these machines are evolving at a rapid clip. In this case, the robot evolved to do some things that we want it to do – and we’re closer to the idea of a “robot butler” than we’ve ever been.
