Alphabet, Google’s parent company, recently laid off 12,000 workers and even 100 robots that cleaned its cafeterias at its headquarters.
Alphabet’s ‘Everyday Robots’ project – an unit under Google’s experimental X laboratories – has been shut down by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, as Wired reported.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has laid off 100 robots that were used to clean its cafeterias. According to a report by Wired, the ‘Everyday Robots’ project, which was a unit under Google’s experimental X laboratories, has been shut down by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The project had trained 100 one-armed, wheeled robots to clean tables and separate trash and recycling in the company’s cafeterias.
Some of these robot prototypes were already in use in Google’s Bay Area facilities and had also been helping to keep conference rooms clean during the pandemic. With the robot division now closed, Alphabet may use some of its technology for other divisions. Alphabet has been developing an integrated hardware and software system for learning over the past few years, including the transfer of knowledge from the virtual to the actual world.
The robots were equipped with machine learning techniques like reinforcement learning, collaborative learning, and learning from demonstration, which allowed them to gain a greater understanding of the world around them and become more skilled at executing ordinary activities. Meanwhile, Google has asked employees returning to work to share their work desks with a “partner” to maximize office space as part of their effort to cut costs.
Alphabet’s this layoff of the 100 robot workers, in an effort to streamline its operations and cut costs, marks the end of a project that had aimed to develop autonomous cleaning robots for Google’s various facilities.
