Humanoid robots showcase skills at Ancient Olympia. But they’re on a long road to catch up to AI

Former Olympia, Greece – With a jerky determination, the robots played football, amazed children with shadow box skills and pulled arrows on the birthplace of the Olympic Games on Monday.

While they were occasionally mixing and relieving themselves for a change of battery, their creators and futureologists have debated the central question of when the robots will be ready to store the cupboards and wash the dishes.

Despite the explosive advance of artificial intelligence in applications like Chatgpt, their physical cousins ​​- robots with human appearances and skills – are late.

“I really believe that the humanoids will first go into space and then in the houses … The house is the last border,” said Minas Liarokapis, a Greek academic and founder of Startup who organized the International Olympiad of the Humanoid.

The four -day event brought together experts and developers of the old Olympia in the south of Greece where the flame is lit every two years for modern summer and winter games.

“To enter the house, it will take more than 10 years. Certainly more,” said Liarokapis. “I’m talking about performing tasks with dexterity, not selling cute robots and companions.”

The AI ​​is underway thanks to large amounts of data easily available online. But the formation of equipment for humanoid robots is rare. It involves real actions that are slower, more expensive and more difficult to record than digital data such as text or images.

From a measure, human robots are approximately 100,000 years behind AI in data learning, according to an article in the current publishing of the journal Science Robotics.

To catch up, the author Ken Goldberg, professor at the University of California in Berkeley, urged manufacturers to go beyond simulations and to combine “old-fashioned engineering” with real world training. This, he argues, would allow robots to “collect data when they carry out useful work, such as taxis driving and sorting packages”.

Luis Sentis, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas in Austin, said that successful robotics required collaboration between researchers, data companies and the main manufacturers to provide a scale. These partnerships, he noted, already attract billions of dollars in funding to develop humanoid robots.

“These synergies occur very, very quickly. So I see these problems being cracking on a daily basis,” said Sentis, who is also co-founder of the humanoid manufacturer Apptronik.

The developers of the Greek event brought their own ideas.

Adeel Akhtar, CEO and founder of the advanced Psyonic prostheses, drew international attention after having appeared in the American television program “Shark Tank” last year in search of investment for the bionic hand of his business, which offers sensory feedback.

This data, he told the Associated Press on Monday, could accelerate the development of robots.

“We have built our hand for humans and robots,” he said. “We therefore fill this gap by really using the hand of the prosthesis on humans, then by translating these (data) on robots.”

Hon Weng Chong, CEO of Cortical Labs, said that the Australian Biotech Company is developing a so-called organic computer that uses real brain cells cultivated on a chip. These cells can learn and react to information – and potentially teach robots to think and adapt more as humans.

At Olympiad, the organizers hoped to file an annual competition base offering an “honest validation of progress made in humanoid robots,” said Patrick Jarvis, who with Liarokapis is co-founder of the manufacturer of Acumino robots.

The organizers have limited events to what humanoids could reasonably try.

“We were trying to get the record and the javelin, but it’s difficult for humanoid robots,” said Jarvis. “We cannot say that the robot can make a high jump because you should build special legs … and it is not necessary for most humanoid robots.”

A company even tested if its machine could manage the weight launch, said Thomas Ryden, executive director of Massrobotics, who worked to “bring as many humanoid companies as possible”.

In the end, several American robotics came to Greece to speak, but few brought robots.

Chinese companies are increasingly present their machines during public events, such as the first humanoid robot games in Beijing in August, while American rivals are mainly sticking to polished videos that can hide failures.

There are exceptions. Elon Musk revealed the Tesla Optimus in 2022: the prototype walked with stiffness on stage, turned and signaled to an enthusiastic crowd.

Boston Dynamics went further. Ten years after launching her dog’s place, the company made them dance in synchrony with a queen song on “America’s Got Talent”.

One of the five broke in routine, creating a reality punchline, but also stressing their agility and coordination.

“Can I be honest with you? I really think – I don’t want to say that in a cruel way – it was strangely better than one of them died,” said judge Simon Cowell. “Because it showed how difficult it was.”

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Technology writer AP Matt O’Brien reported to Providence, Rhode Island.