Fujitsu HOAP 2 Robot Cleans Dry Erase Boards

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Admittedly, a robot that can wipe down a dry erase board isn’t exactly overwhelming news, but the implications of this will excite where the story itself might not. This comes from the folks who only recently taught a robot to fire a bow and arrow, and it’s steadily getting less esoteric and more functional.

Considering that they started out by teaching a robot arm to flip pancakes by doing it over and over and over again, and then taught a larger robot to fire a bow and arrow via the same process of repetition, it likely won’t surprised anyone to discover that the HOAP 2 robot was taught to clean a dry erase board in much the same way, by repetition and that sweet kinesthetic teaching process that worked so well on earlier models.

Basically, they put a small eraser in the robot’s hand, and then pulled the robot’s arm through a series of sweeping patterns. The resulting movements were recorded by a force-torque sensor in the wrist, so that the robot could learn to repeat the patterns itself. And the robot kept its balance through all that movement by way of an ankle-hip algorithm.

If a robot can work a dry erase board, it stands to reason that it can wash a window, which is essentially the same basic process. In fact, once it masters wipe / repeat until a surface is free of dirt, it opens up a whole lot of household chores for a robot to do that people will, in turn, no longer have to.

Of course, it will also in turn likely result in the loss of a whole lot of jobs, once places like hotels start buying cleaning robots and firing their maintenance staffs, but the time to go all the way up the tech tree from “wiping a dry erase board” to “independently cleaning a floor’s worth of motel rooms” is probably best measured in decades than months, but still, the possibility exists.