The AI revolution is coming to robots: how will it change them?

For a generation of scientists raised watching Star Wars, there’s a disappointing lack of C-3PO-like droids wandering around our cities and homes. Where are the humanoid robots fuelled with common sense that can help around the house and workplace? Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might be set to fill that hole. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we are the last generation for which those sci-fi scenes are not a reality,” says Alexander Khazatsky, a machine-learning and robotics researcher at Stanford University in California. From OpenAI to Google DeepMind, almost every big technology firm with AI expertise is now working on bringing the versatile learning algorithms that power chatbots, known as foundation models, to robotics. The idea is to imbue robots with common-sense knowledge, letting them tackle a wide range of tasks. Many researchers think that robots could become really good, really fast. “We believe we are at the point of a step change in robotics,” says Gerard Andrews, a marketing manager focused on robotics at technology company Nvidia in Santa Clara, California, which in March launched a general-purpose AI model designed for humanoid robots.