TRENDS
What Robots
Can’t Grasp
These engineers are training the next generation
of robots to pick up just about anything.
10
BY MARTY GRAHAM
There are some things robots just can’t grasp. Literally.
And a team of engineers and data scientists at the
University of California, Berkeley’s AUTOLAB is
creating more of these unwieldy objects all the time.
The effort isn’t an exercise in mechanical cruelty;
rather, these weird-looking objects—what professors
Ken Goldberg and Jeff Mahler call “adversarial”
objects—are part of a trial-and-error approach to
helping the robots at AUTOLAB develop the knowhow
to pick up a range of oddly-shaped items. And
that’s an increasingly important skill these days.
Demand for robots has increased every year,
according to the Robotic Industries Association
(RIA). While retail giants and auto manufacturers
have historically represented the highest demand,
more companies outside the vehicle sector are
beginning to install robots. Of the nearly 36,000
robots purchased in 2018, 16,702 were shipped to
non-automotive companies—a 41 percent increase
compared to 2017.
With this more pervasive installation of robots
comes expanded use cases beyond the repetitive,
highly-controlled tasks they’ve been relegated to
in warehouses and on factory floors. But they have
their limits.
While robots are already completing precise assembly
work, repeating a very limited set of tasks
over and over again, situations—such as shifting
rapidly to sort and pick up random objects to fill a
retail order—stymie them. Consider, for example,
the few seconds it takes for a human to remove a
pizza from an oven and turn the oven off; uncork
a bottle of wine, and find and fill a glass; grab a
PHOTOS BY JASON LACRAS