Toyota Robotics

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Toyota Gives Robots a Soft Touch, Better Vision   By CNET

TRI's robots can understand clear or reflective surfaces, a sensing task that foiled earlier robots.

Researchers at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in Los Altos, CA, are working on robots that will help people in day-to-day life. They have developed a soft touch sensing gripper that helps robots determine the right amount of force to grip an item and help identify objects by touch. TRI researchers also have developed methods to help robots understand clear or reflective surfaces.

Bigger goals remain. "What you don't see today is humans and robots really interfacing together, which really limits how much robots can amplify humans' ability," says Max Bajracharya, vice president of robotics at TRI.

To address this challenge, TRI is focusing on Intelligence Amplification, which involves enhancing humans' superior intelligence with a robot's strength, precision, persistence, and repeatability.

From CNET  Full Article:  

Ceiling Mounted Home Robotics

 An areas we looked at closely to augment smart home studies.  Placing robot arms in key positions was a common solution to ambulatory examples. Note unpredictability of homes. Especially for eldercare applications.  Have not seen this mentioned in a long time.

Toyota Research Demonstrates Ceiling-Mounted Home Robot   Toyota seems to be engaged.

This prototype manipulator is just one of the cool robots that TRI has been working on  By Evan Ackerman

One of the robots Toyota demonstrated was a gantry robot that would hang from the ceiling to perform tasks like wiping surfaces and clearing clutter.

Gill Pratt Discusses Toyota’s AI Plans and the Future of Robots and Cars

CES 2020: Toyota Is Building an Entire City Full of Autonomous Cars and Robots

Over the last several years, Toyota has been putting more muscle into forward-looking robotics research than just about anyone. In addition to the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), there’s that massive 175-acre robot-powered city of the future that Toyota still plans to build next to Mount Fuji. Even Toyota itself acknowledges that it might be crazy, but that’s just how they roll—as TRI CEO Gill Pratt told me a while back, when Toyota decides to do something, they really do go all-in on it.

TRI has been focusing heavily on home robots, which is reflective of the long-term nature of what TRI is trying to do, because home robots are both the place where we’ll need robots the most at the same time as they’re the place where it’s going to be hardest to deploy them. The unpredictable nature of homes, and the fact that homes tend to have squishy fragile people in them, are robot-unfriendly characteristics, but as the population continues to age (an increasingly acute problem in Japan), homes offer an enormous amount of potential for helping us maintain our independence.... "