ChatGPT Designed a Robot

In an example of human and AI collaboration, researchers worked with ChatGPT to design a tomato-harvesting robot.

In an era where ChatGPT has demonstrated its remarkable capabilities in generating poems, essays, and programming code, researchers have embarked on an intriguing exploration.

Can ChatGPT extend its expertise to the realm of designing robots?

The result is reported in the study published in Nature Machine Intelligence¹ and, not surprisingly, the answer seems to be ‘Yes’.

Large Language Models are competent in many fields of knowledge — many more than a single human being could be — and they are already used in robotics to translate natural language instructions.

Taking things a step further, the researchers, assistant professor Cosimo Della Santina and PhD student Francesco Stella, both from the Technical University of Delft (TU Delft), and Josie Hughes from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), considered how LLMs could contribute to the robot design.

Could LLMs engage in a dialogue that guides humans in building a robot from scratch?

Would such a process fundamentally change the design method and reduce the human input to that of a technician? Or, in other words, to what extent can ChatGPT replace an engineer and design a robot?

This was the question that the researchers asked ChatGPT when looking for an area of application. And from this, they settled on the challenge of food supply.

“We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” says Della Santina and, according to Stella, the chat robot taught them which crop would be most economically valuable to automate. Thus, after further consultation with ChatGPT, they decided to design a robot for harvesting tomatoes.

The researchers followed ChatGPT’s lead in the design of the robot and they found the experience to be a positive one. However, as Stella says, “We did find that our role as engineers shifted towards performing more technical tasks”.

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