Every afternoon at 1:30, the robots file into the café. Gliding their way into the dining area on four wheels, the cadre of one-armed creatures weave through a maze of tables. Like hunters stalking prey, they swivel their binocular-sized heads, staring at their surroundings through an array of cameras and sensors. Additional vision is supplied by a Lidar sensor, similar to those on autonomous cars. If these robots had weapons, their appearance would incite panic. But instead, attached to the end of each of those robot arms is a custom squeegee.
These creatures are targeting tabletops. One of them will wheel up to a table and ponder for a few seconds to determine if people are seated; if so, it moves on until finding one that’s empty. After lingering for a second—maybe taking the algorithmic equivalent of a deep breath before the “Let’s do it” moment—the robot twirls and unfurls its limb, stretching the arm over the table to methodically cover the surface with a clear disinfectant. Then it withdraws the arm to squeeze out the excess fluid into a bucket on its base. Task completed, it moves on, seeking another table to swipe.
People finishing their lunch don’t even bother to look up. The robots have been doing this for weeks.
No, this isn’t a desperate attempt to address the labor shortage. It’s research by Everyday Robots, a project of X, Alphabet’s self-styled “moonshot factory.” The café testing ground is one of dozens on the Google campus in Mountain View, California, where a small percentage of the company’s massive workforce has now returned to work. The project hopes to make robots useful, operating in the wild instead of controlled environments like factories. After years of development, Everyday Robots is finally sending its robots into the world—or at least out of the X headquarters building—to do actual work. It’s enough of a milestone that they invited me to observe, two years after WIRED’s Tom Simonite last looked at the project. At that point, they had robots sorting trash into the proper recycling bin. Janitorial services represent the next, if not the final, frontier.
I kid, but this is serious stuff. Everyday Robots is trying to do two really hard things, a challenge so hairy that some question whether the effort is worth it. The first is credibly performing the tasks of human helpers. Everyday Robots lives on the razor’s edge of Moravec’s paradox, which states that it’s relatively easy for computers to perform difficult cognitive work and devilishly difficult to duplicate the functions of a two-year-old. Elsewhere under the Alphabet umbrella, robots navigate complicated traffic routes, drive automobiles more safely than humans, and become the champion of Go. In the Everyday Robots world, conquering a mundane task, such as crossing a cluttered room and opening a tricky door handle, is like winning the Super Bowl. The table wiping activity, for instance, isn’t just the swipe—it includes a whole suite of actions leading up to it. Take what happens when the path is blocked by a human or object. “The proper response for the robot is, OK, do I have enough space to gracefully move around that?” says Darcy Grinolds, who is the lead of the project’s hardware reliability and design validation team. “Or do I need to reroute myself around completely?”
The second hard thing the project is attempting to do is move toward that goal in such a way that it makes more sense, in terms of both economics and efficiency, to have a robot on hand than a bored and underpaid human.
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