Everyday Robots Mobile Manipulator

The single-arm wheeled mobile robot used in Google's RT-1 and SayCan work.

This is the wheeled mobile-manipulation robot built by the Everyday Robots team, incubated within Alphabet's X moonshot division: a mobile base on the bottom, a 7-DoF robot arm with a two-finger gripper on top, and a head carrying a camera and other sensors. The team once had over a hundred of these robots wiping tables, sorting trash, and opening doors around Google's own offices. It was the main platform behind Google's robot-learning papers, with SayCan, RT-1, and RT-2 all running experiments on it; RT-1 in particular used 13 of these robots to collect about 130,000 demonstrations over 17 months. In February 2023, the project was shut down as part of Alphabet's broader layoffs earlier that year, with part of the team and its technology folded into Google Research's robotics efforts. The robot itself was never commercialized, but the data it collected, the RT-1 dataset, was incorporated into Open X-Embodiment and continues to have influence today.

ExampleIn a SayCan demo, after hearing “I spilled my drink,” the robot planned out finding a sponge and bringing it over, and carried out the steps in the kitchen.

Also called

EDR, Google Mobile Manipulator

Related

Everyday Robots (Alphabet X) · Mobile Manipulator · RT-1 · SayCan · RT-1 Robot Action Dataset (Fractal) · Google DeepMind

Sources

Alphabet closes Everyday Robots among layoffs - The Robot Report
RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale (arXiv)

As of

2023-02