Gizmos & Gadgets: IBM Melds Watson AI to a General Purpose Factory Robot

April 23, 2017 – IBM is pursuing creating general purpose robots that interact with humans in factory settings using their artificial intelligence (AI) Watson technology. Munich, Germany, is home to the Watson IoT Laboratory where IBM demonstrated their latest creation, a cloud-connected robot arm being built for Foxconn, the Taiwan manufacturer of Apple iPhones.

Foxconn is automating its factories and recently announced it had replaced 60,000 of its employees by deploying robots in their place. The robot being developed for Foxconn by IBM, a robotic arm, is capable of doing almost anything it is told through a voice recognition interface. Sebastien Chaumiole from IBM, describes the the robot as a co-worker. “It will behave naturally with you and understand the context you are in.”

How does it translate what you say to execution?

IBM has created a cloud computing environment consisting of several layers. Voice commands are sent to cloud-based transcription and translation services which can convert an English instruction into another language such as Mandarin. In the recent demonstration the robot was asked by its human co-worker to draw some intricate Chinese word characters. It did this with ease using a calligraphy pen which it dipped repeatedly into an inkwell before returning to the writing pallet.

There is nothing unique about the robot arm being deployed. it is a pretty standard Foxconn industrial robot that operates using proprietary software developed by the manufacturer. But the messages and instructions for execution all come from IBM Watson.

As a demonstration of the potential of the integration of human and robot workers, the IBM Watson cloud interface is quite exciting. A human worker could request the robot arm to do almost anything. Translating an English-language request into the execution of a program all happens through the cloud interface. The key will be the accuracy of the voice recognition to translation.