Toyota

Machines are doing light janitorial work in the uncontrolled environment of Google’s offices. Everyday Robots, a new spin-out from Google’s experimental X Development division, unleashed 100 robots to perform an array of cleanup tasks.

Every home is different. That makes it difficult for domestic robots to translate skills learned in one household into another. Training in virtual reality, where the robot has access to rich information about three-dimensional objects, can make it easier to generalize skills to the real world.