As usual, people get over-excited about videos that seem to be showing robots doing something useful, when in truth they're doing something that shows how far a

As usual, people get over-excited about videos that seem to be showing robots doing something useful, when in truth they're doing something that shows how far away we are from robotic autonomy. It's like the dancing robot videos by Boston Dynamics all over again. The Aloha systems in this video are just as scripted as Boston Dynamics robots. The difference is in how the robots' behaviours are scripted: instead of hard-coding Finite State Controllers, the behaviours are programmed by demonstration, through teleoperation. The end result is the same: the final system can do one thing, and do it well enough to put in a video, but it can't deal with changes to the environment or to the initial setup of the task. For instance, in the shoe-lace tying part of the video, the shoe is already placed neatly in between the two arms and only at a small angle away from the vertical, the laces are pulled to the side and of course the knot is already half-tied. If you changed those initial parameters by a few units, placed the shoe further towards the top or bottom of the table, had both laces on one side, or turned the shoe in a right angle to the arms, the system would fail. Despite the "generalisation to sweater" video, there's very little flexiblity and very little generalisation, and that's still a system that can perform a handful of discrete tasks (swap gripper, tie shoelaces, hang shirt). That's not a system that can function autonomously in the real world. No robot maids or android valets coming in a shop near you any time soon, I'm afraid. In the foreseeable future the most successful autonomous systems will remain self-guided munition, which are made to be destroyed on impact and cause maximum damage.