One of the world’s most interesting robots has undergone a makeover.
The Vancouver-born Phoenix, developed by local robotics firm Sanctuary AI, has re-launched as the seventh generation of itself—a new and improved humanoid bot.
Phoenix is at once fascinating—named last year one of the world’s top inventions—and also boring: the robot is designed to perform some of the most menial tasks one might imagine, such as folding mountains of clothes.
But that’s exactly the idea with Phoenix. Sanctuary AI wants to perfect a robot that happily and effectively performs manual everyday tasks that humans dislike doing (especially for minimum wage).
Phoenix doesn’t work alone. The robot is powered by Carbon, Sanctuary’s proprietary control system powered by artificial intelligence.
RELATED: Sanctuary AI is hiring on Techtalent.ca
The seventh generation Phoenix builds on its 2023 predecessor with upgrades to both the robot’s hardware and his AI software, Sanctuary says—including increased uptime, enhanced range of motion through the wrists and elbows, and miniaturized hydraulics that reduce weight, power consumption, and complexity associated with Phoenix.
The robot is also cheaper and faster to manufacture and automate than previous iterations, according to Geordie Rose, a cofounder of Sanctuary.
“It’s incredible to see the progress that has been made in just 11 months,” says Rose, who serves his company as CEO. “With Generation 7, we have a system that we believe is the most closely analogous to a person of any available.”
Rose believes Sanctuary AI sits squarely at “the cornerstone of general purpose AI robotics,” with Phoenix and Carbon representing “a critical step on the path to artificial general intelligence.”
“We’re thrilled to be leading the charge on it,” Rose stated, referring to his company’s pioneering in the humanoid robots space. “This all adds up to being able to capture increasing quantities of higher quality, higher fidelity human behavioural data, which in turn will expedite the development of foundational AI models and customer deployments.”
Founded in 2018, Sanctuary AI has collaborated recently with the likes of global mobility technology company Magna as well as global professional services company Accenture. The company is among Canada’s top startups to work for.
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