Robotics researchers at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences have acquired a 140-pound, nearly six-foot-tall robot that looks and acts much like a human.
The Fourier Intelligence GR-2 humanoid robot arrived at the University near the end of the spring semester, and the robotics team has been hard at work developing software that enables the humanoid to complete household tasks.
"Now with the combination of new, fantastic hardware and the technology that AI is offering us, it's quite astonishing what we can do," said Ubbo Visser, a professor in the Department of Computer Science who leads the robotics program. "We're all excited."
This summer, the RoboCanes team was one of only 24 worldwide to qualify for the RoboCup@Home league, an international robotics competition in which robots compete in tasks like folding laundry and welcoming guests to a party. The team had the top-performing adult-sized robot in the league and was the only one from the Americas that was able to compete using a humanoid.
These accomplishments are especially notable because this was the first year humanoid robots competed in the RoboCup@Home league. In previous years, the teams used smaller, wheeled robots like the Toyota Human Support Robots the RoboCanes team has employed in past competitions.
"The whole team was really excited about getting to know this humanoid and getting to work on it," said Katarzyna Pasternak, a Ph.D. student studying human-robot interactions who serves as the team leader.
In addition to Pasternak, the team includes Ph.D. students Christopher Duarte, Shengxin Luo, Julio Ojalvo, and Dewan Tauhid Rahman, along with recent graduate Simon Jaimes, who completed his bachelor's degree in May.
This year's RoboCup competition showed how quickly the field is advancing.
"With all of the large language models and visual language models that boomed in the last few years, a lot of things moved forward," Pasternak said. "There are problems that we had a hard time solving a couple years ago that are now very easily solvable by the large language models. For example, understanding complex sentences was a big task before. Now, it's something that's very easy to understand and break down into actionable items."
Researchers have also made strides in the area of coordination between humanoids. This year at RoboCup, two full teams of humanoid robots competed in an 11-versus-11 soccer match for the first time.
"That was remarkable," said Visser, who also serves as president of the RoboCup Federation, which runs the RoboCup competitions and an international symposium.
The RoboCanes team is especially excited about the humanoid robot's fingers, which will enable it to perform tasks like opening a bottle of water, unscrewing a jar, or handing items to a human.
"The beauty of having a large humanoid in the lab is that it opens up completely new functionality," Visser explained. "The reason why we bought this [robot] is because of the dexterity."
This dexterity will help the team reach its long-term goal, which is to develop software for an autonomous household robot that could care for an elderly person in their home. Autonomous household robots could eventually help fill labor shortages in countries facing aging populations and declining fertility rates, where the number of elderly people who need help in their homes may soon exceed the number of young people able to provide it.
Visser and Pasternak said researchers still have a long way to go before an autonomous household robot can perform all the tasks necessary to care for an elderly person, however.
For a robot to function autonomously outside a laboratory, many different parts need to work together seamlessly: motion control, sensors, vision, language comprehension, navigation, and task execution.
"What people underestimate is that to make a holistic humanoid that is autonomous and does something in the real world, a lot of integration is required," Visser said. "Sometimes, even with the help of AI, it's not that easy."
Some of the challenges in this field have more to do with human perceptions than hardware or software. A nearly six-foot-tall robot with human-like arms and legs can seem intimidating.
For Pasternak's dissertation, she is still using the smaller, friendlier-looking Toyota Human Support Robots, which measure approximately three feet high. This is in part because her research involves using robots in a medical clinic to educate children and their parents about asthma medication.
"Most kids are so excited to see the robot. They're very curious, they want to interact with it, they want to touch it," she said. "I don't know how they're going to react to an adult-sized humanoid that looks a little bit like a Terminator."
