By Sean Cummings

Whenever Professor Shuran Song teaches robotics, she asks her students the same question: What daily tasks would you most like a robot to do?

"The two requests that always come up are 'washing dishes' and 'cleaning my room,'" reports Shuran.

So far, the first task is best left to a dishwasher. But for the second, Song and an interinstitutional team of roboticists may have a solution: TidyBot, a one-armed helper that cleans according to personal preferences. The group, which includes researchers from ​​Princeton University, The Nueva School, Columbia University, and Google, presented a paper on the robot and its performance at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems on October 2nd. An extended journal version of the paper will appear soon in Autonomous Robots in the special issue on robots and large language models.

"We all experience it: our home or lab or office gets messy," said Jeannette Bohg, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford and another of the paper's authors. "Now imagine you just tell a robot, 'In my place, this is where that thing goes, and that is where this thing goes.' Then you leave and let the robot tidy up."

Getting TidyBot to generalize across environments as well as objects will take time and effort. But as large language models and vision models improve, so will TidyBot’s ability to process information and make correct decisions in new scenarios. In theory, Shuran said, there may be no limit to how many combinations of items and environments TidyBot could eventually work with. As long as an object exists on the internet, TidyBot could learn to recognize and categorize it.

"Maybe in the long term we can think about a more general-purpose robot that’s also able to cook my meal, make my bed, do my laundry," Shuran mused. But for now, she said, "If I have a robot that's able to reliably put my things away, that's a pretty good goal to achieve already."

Excerpted from Stanford News, "This robot learns to clean your space just the way you like it."