Eve Humanoid Robot Update Enables Back-to-Back Tasks With Voice Commands

1X Technologies' humanoid robot Eve can now perform multiple tasks back-to-back through voice instructions.

The company added a voice-controlled natural language interface that allows users to instruct multiple robots to perform tasks using their voice.

Humans can ask Eve to perform a general task, and it can handle a variety of related tasks.

1X posted a video where a human asks Eve to tidy up — the robot then autonomously performs a variety of tasks, including picking up and putting away objects and wiping tables clean.

1X said it previously looked at an autonomous model that would merge related tasks, but said it found small-scale systems affect a robot’s behavior.

“Although humans can do long horizon chores trivially, chaining multiple autonomous robot skills in a sequence is hard because the second skill has to generalize to all the slightly random starting positions that the robot finds itself in when the first skill finishes,” said Eric Jang, 1X’s vice president of AI. “This compounds with every successive skill, the third skill has to handle the variation in outcomes of the second skill and so forth.”

To improve autonomous multi-task efforts, 1X integrated multiple processes into a single neural network, enabling the voice-controlled interface to chain commands together.

“From the user perspective, the robot is capable of doing many natural language tasks and the actual number of models controlling the robot is abstracted away,” Jang said. “This allows us to merge the single-task models into goal-conditioned models over time. 

“Single-task models also provide a good baseline to do shadow mode evaluations: comparing how a new model’s predictions differ from an existing baseline at test-time. Once the goal-conditioned model matches single-task model predictions well, we can switch over to a more powerful, unified model with no change to the user workflow.”

1X (formerly Halodi Robotics) is a Norwegian robotics company that’s backed by ChatGPT maker OpenAI. It’s building humanoid robots that can operate as assistants as well as in industrial settings.

The company’s Eve units were made commercially available in January.