- Genesis AI robot’s hands handle frontier tasks
- They can make eggs and solve a Rubik’s cube.
- The training is done, in part, using low-cost, portable gloves.
If there’s a single obstacle preventing humanoid robots from entering our homes and workplaces, it might be “frontier tasks.” These are complex tasks that involve several steps, such as working as a lab assistant, solving a Rubik’s cube, or preparing a delicious smoothie or omelette. They’re the kind of things most humans can do without thinking, but for robots and AI, it’s nearly impossible to match your average lab technician or fast-food cook in these skills.
Today, however, I saw a robot casually wipe some egg yolk off its fingers while preparing some lightly scrambled eggs. It was such a normal occurrence while successfully cooking a meal that, for a second, I forgot I was watching disembodied robotic hands perform the task.
Those same highly dexterous robotic hands, all built and programmed by Genesis AI, also solved a Rubik’s cube, did more than a passable job as a lab assistant, and even made a delicious purple smoothie. Hands, part of a three-part system for developing, training, and deploying AI, appear poised to change the way we think about robots at home and in the workplace.
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“I don’t know, if you know this,” Vivian Sun, vice president of business and strategy at Genesis AI, told me, “80% of human work is done with our hands.” It turns out that this presents a big problem with our long-dreamed-of and rapidly approaching robotic future. The type of work we do with our hands requires patience, skill and human-level dexterity (which is considerable).
Make and train a believable robotic hand
Solving that problem and offering a solution to its Fortune 500 customers who have a multitude of use cases for such robots became a priority for Genesis AI. The solution was not just a robot or even an algorithm. It’s a comprehensive solution that starts with data collection and a set of patented gloves.
Trainers wear thin, wireless gloves, which are covered in sensors and even include a camera, as they perform these frontier tasks, like making an egg, hundreds of times. “[It’s] the most natural way to interact with the physical world,” Sun explained.
Those same trainers also wear a head-mounted camera to watch how, for example, a human cracks an egg.
That training data is then combined with “internet-level data” – basically thousands of online videos showing people breaking eggs and making scrambled eggs.
It’s all valuable data that’s fed into the new version 26.5 of Genesis’ Gene Foundation model, and then used to train and operate Genesis AI’s proprietary robotic hands.
Looks and works like the real thing.
Genesis AI is unlikely to have the same kind of success if they fed this intricate data into a pair of claws.
“We have the most human-like robotic hand. These hands are property of Genesis AI…[they] “They look exactly like a human hand in terms of functionality, proportions, size and shapes,” Sun said.
They close a critical gap in the domain not only because they look like human hands but, as I noticed in the videos, because they also move like them. In the video of the egg, underneath a pair of latex gloves, they could be mistaken for human palms and 10 digits, except for the trunk of the robot to which they are connected.
The end-to-end process allows for a virtually direct transfer of human skill to the robot incarnation. Geneis AI believes it is a scalable solution. Sun told me that the training glove set is much more affordable and sensible than the current robotic training method: teleoperation.
Teleoperation “is quite cumbersome. You have to prepare the setup, hire people… and most of the time you can’t even recreate that scenario. For example, if you’re trying to learn how to repair jet engines, how would you build a jet engine in-house? That’s just impossible,” Sun said.
He couldn’t quote the price of the gloves or the robotic hands, but he told me that the gloves will be “50 times less expensive than any other product in the industry” and added that they are 100 times cheaper than teleoperation.
What’s next?
In the long term, Genesis AI plans to mass produce the glove and ship it to businesses and homes, where users can help train the Genesis AI robots.
Of course, for now they’re just a pair of highly articulated hands, but Sun told me they’re building a full robot.
Would they call it “Genesis Robot”? Sun didn’t say it, but laughed: “We have a name that we will tell you very soon. We went through several workshops based on the name. So yes, there is a name.”
For now, however, we have this small collection of frontier task videos that highlight what may be the pinnacle of robot prowess. I asked Sun what he thought the first time he saw them.
“Personally, I was stunned… to actually see it, do these kinds of long-term, complicated tasks, it was almost like a reality check moment: This is the world we live in.”
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