The advent of AI technologies has fueled ambitions to integrate robots into our everyday social fabric. However, they are usually coded to perform specific tasks. In this context, Sanctuary AI, a forward-thinking Canadian startup, is dedicated to developing the first human-level AI housed in general-purpose robots. The company just announced significant advances in introducing the Phoenix humanoid robot, the sixth generation of a general-purpose robot.

Founded in 2018 in Vancouver, Canada, Sanctuary AI has set itself an ambitious mission: to develop human-level AI to house it in universal robots, which in itself is a world first. Ultimately, this means that robots are able to perform a variety of tasks with the same dexterity as humans. The ultimate goal is to support safer, more efficient, more sustainable work and address the workforce challenges that many organizations face today.

Last March, the company announced the successful implementation of this type of robot in a store. The week-long pilot program successfully tested the universal robot in a real-world environment, completing 110 tasks ranging from finding and packing goods to cleaning, labeling, folding and more.

On May 16th, Sanctuary AI celebrated a notable breakthrough with the unveiling of Phoenix, its sixth-generation general-purpose robot featuring an innovative and proprietary artificial intelligence control system called Carbon, designed to endow Phoenix with near-human intelligence, allowing it to Achievements to perform hundreds of tasks.

A revolutionary AI system

in one communicatesannounced Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of Sanctuary AI: We designed Phoenix to be the most sensory and physically capable humanoid robot ever built, and to enable Carbon’s rapidly growing intelligence to perform the widest possible range of work tasks. “. Carbon brings together modern artificial intelligence technologies to translate natural language into concrete actions in the real world and to interact like ChatGPT.

What sets Sanctuary AI apart is its “general” perspective. The robot must be able to adapt to any environment and under any circumstance and perform physical work in the same way as a human, with the necessary level of reflection. In practice, thanks to telepresence, robots learn any task identified in a specific work context. A human operator wearing a virtual reality headset and mounted on a motion capture platform sees through the robot’s cameras and feels what he “feels” through his sensors. The operator’s actions control the robot, while the robot’s AI systems observe, feel and learn.

When the AI ​​recognizes movement patterns, it begins to build up a repertoire of task-specific actions until it can perform them autonomously. This training is performed for each task required to perform the intended work and assembled by the AI. Once the robot is in the situation, it can access this data, combine these autonomous tasks into longer sequences, becoming an example of supervised autonomy.

in one blog entry In a report published in April, the company acknowledged: ” In most of the videos that we will publish, the robots will be teleoperated by a person “. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately assess the current stage of development of this revolutionary AI and its ability to reproduce tasks flexibly and usefully.

Refined and perfected hands

Phoenix is ​​170 centimeters tall, weighs 70.3 kilograms and can travel at a top speed of 4.8 kilometers per hour. According to the company, it can lift a maximum payload of 25 kilograms. However, if you want to build a truly versatile humanoid robot, you can’t do it without the skills of human hands. Hands are the central working tool, be it professional or domestic tasks, such as collecting mail, turning on lights, preparing food and cleaning.

We tend to underestimate the complexity and tremendous capabilities that our hands offer us. They are the primary tools we use to put our thoughts into action and interact with the real world. The humanoid form of Phoenix is ​​therefore equipped with extremely agile robotic hands that offer 20 degrees of freedom of movement and allow him to manipulate objects in the same way as a human hand. These hands feature haptic technology that mimics the sense of touch.

Rose concludes: We envision a future where general-purpose robots are as ubiquitous as cars and helping people get the work that needs done, even when there just aren’t enough people to get the job done. “.

Still, the company is still a long way from its ultimate goal of bringing human intelligence to the robot. Although he has legs, he cannot currently walk. Sanctuary therefore installed it on a motorized rolling platform. The alliance between the capabilities of neural models based on large linguistic models like ChatGPT and those of general-purpose robots with physical targets is far from operational.

VIDEO : Demonstration of Phoenix’s skills. © Sanctuary AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2GhgO7SnZQ