The Everyday Robot Project is developing a general-purpose learning robot that can operate autonomously in unstructured environments. Cameras and sophisticated machine learning models help our robots see and understand the world. The robot is designed to grasp, move, and interact with all kinds of everyday objects. The robot uses data from its sensors to create an understanding of what it is seeing, hearing, and where it is in the world—allowing it to safely perform useful tasks among people in everyday environments.

Building robots that can operate autonomously in unstructured human environments, like our homes and offices, is a complex, unsolved problem. It requires tackling and integrating some of the hardest hardware and software challenges in the field of robotics today. The Everyday Robot Project is building a new type of learning robot — one that can eventually learn to help everyone, every day. Today, most robots operate in environments specifically designed and structured for them. The tasks they complete are very specific, and robots need to be painstakingly coded to perform those tasks in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time. As a result, robots are incapable of adapting to the unpredictable and unstructured nature of everyday life.

Our moonshot is to see if we can make robots as helpful to people in the physical world as computers now are in the virtual world.