Apple’s Lamp Robot Is a Weird Machine Learning Research Project ⇥ machinelearning.apple.com

One of the odder Apple rumours remaining unresolved is its robotics project.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in April:

Engineers at Apple have been exploring a mobile robot that can follow users around their homes, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the skunk-works project is private. The iPhone maker also has developed an advanced table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around, they said.

On first glance, these ideas are weird, right? I can see the appeal of things like these, especially for people with disabilities or who are older. But they do not really fit my expectations of a typical Apple product, which are often designed for mass markets, and to recede into a lived environment instead of being so conspicuous. Yet Gurman followed up in August with news this is something the company is actually interested in.

Then last month, on its Machine Learning Research blog, Apple published a post describing “ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot”, and a companion paper that helps explain the forced acronym. Embedded in the post is a video that, indeed, shows a table-mounted lamp that responds to a user’s gestures. It is really quite something.

This is nominally research about making a robot’s movements less — uh — robotic. The result is a lamp that more than one publication has compared to the charming Pixar intro. It is very cool — but it is still very weird. Apple almost never shows works-in-progress, and what is posted to its research blog does not necessarily correlate to real-world products. Also, I am not accustomed to this much whimsy in anything Apple has released for at least a decade. It is refreshing.