Assistive robot adapts to people, new places

In the futuristic cartoon series “The Jetsons,” a robotic maid named Rosie whizzed around the Jetsons’ home doing household chores–cleaning, cooking dinner and washing dishes.

Such a vision of robotic housekeeping is likely decades away from becoming reality. But at MIT, researchers are working on a very early version of such intelligent, robotic helpers–a humanoid called Domo who grasp objects and place them on shelves or counters.

A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes. Other potential applications include agriculture, space travel and assisting workers on an assembly line, says Aaron Edsinger, an MIT postdoctoral associate who has been working on Domo for the last three years.

Edsinger describes Domo as the “next generation” of earlier robots built at MIT–Kismet, which was designed to interact with humans, and Cog, which could learn to manipulate unknown objects. Domo incorporates elements of both of those robots.

“The real potential of robots in the future is going to be realized when they can do many types of manual tasks,” including those that require interaction with humans, Edsinger said.

There are now plenty of robots doing manual work on factory assembly lines, but those machines follow a script and can’t learn to adapt to new situations, as Domo can, said Rodney Brooks, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“Robots in an automobile factory manipulate objects, but they do the same thing, along the same path, every time,” Brooks said. “If robots are ever going to be truly useful, they need to be able to manipulate the objects we manipulate.”

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