Your aging loved one is home alone.
Heavy pots and pans fill high shelves. A light bulb out of easy reach needs to be changed. Outside, the overgrown lawn waves in the wind. Like 75% of Americans, your family member wants to remain independent in their own home. But, like many, you are concerned about the growing aging population and the shortage of health care workers to assist them.
In Mountain View, California, Heni Ben Amor is hard at work on the future of robotics. He is an associate professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.
Ben Amor spent a year embedded in Google’s DeepMind, part of a team that is coming up with the solution to your problem, and it’s a robot … that can play table tennis. If you did a double take just now, he hopes that you understand something important.
The same skills that help the table tennis bot move, react and understand instructions during play are key for building robots that could help aging adults live independently. Imagine a robot that helps you grab items from a high shelf, prepares meals and tidies up the house — and processes what you’re asking it to do. That’s the reality Ben Amor and the DeepMind team are working toward.
“If you want to get robots out of the manufacturing plant, make them learn a sport,” Ben Amor says. “They will pick up all the needed skills. These robots have to be really dynamic. They have to be aware of their surroundings. They have to anticipate the behavior of the people around them.”
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