Google's Parent Alphabet Ends Domestic Robot Helper Project

pcmag.com:

Google’s parent company Alphabet is shutting down its domestic robot helper project Everyday Robots in the latest of a string of cutbacks at the firm.

As Wired reported(Opens in a new window), Everyday Robots will cease to exist as a “separate project” within Alphabet. Denise Gamboa, director of marketing and communications told Wired: “Some of the technology and part of the team will be consolidated into existing robotics efforts within Google Research.”

PCMag reached out to Alphabet to ask how many people would be affected by layoffs from the project shut down, and we will update this story as soon as they respond. The news comes after Alphabet announced(Opens in a new window) it would let go of around 12,000 employees on Jan. 20, which amounts to 6% of its total workforce. Meanwhile, Intrinsic, an Alphabet subsidiary working on industrial robots, has faced a 20% cut(Opens in a new window) to its staff.

The Everyday Robots project originated after Google bought(Opens in a new window) the robotics engineering company Boston Dynamics back in 2013, and its development saw a fleet of robots repeating tasks like sorting rubbish. Eventually, as Wired notes in its report, the one-armed robots would help to clean Google’s dining halls and tidy up conference rooms. 

The robots had been showing promising signs in the domestic settings they were trained in until very recently, however. Last year, Google AI researchers integrated a ChatGPT-like language model into the robots system which meant they responded to someone saying they were hungry by getting a bag of chips for them.

And in a November 2021 blog post(Opens in a new window) on Google’s research and development offshoot for radical technologies, X, Chief Robot Officer Hans