ChatGPT, Can You Help Design a Tomato Harvesting Robot? Yes
Is there anything the open AI platform ChatGPT can’t handle? The answer to that is still unclear; however, new AI developments recently inspired researchers at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands and the Swiss technical university EPFL to dig a little deeper. For instance, can ChatGPT also design a robot? And is this a good thing for the design process, or are there risks? The researchers published their findings in Nature Machine Intelligence.
What are the greatest future challenges for humanity? This was the first question that Cosimo Della Santina, Assistant Professor, and PhD student Francesco Stella, both from TU Delft, and Josie Hughes from EPFL, asked ChatGPT.
“We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” says Della Santina. In the end, they chose the food supply as their challenge, and as they chatted with ChatGPT, they came up with the idea of creating a tomato harvesting robot.
Helpful Suggestions
The researchers followed all of ChatGPT’s design decisions. Their input proved particularly valuable in the conceptual phase, according to Stella.
“ChatGPT extends the designer’s knowledge to other areas of expertise. For example, the chat robot taught us which crop would be most economically valuable to automate.”
But ChatGPT also came up with useful suggestions during the implementation phase, such as “Make the gripper out of silicone or rubber to avoid crushing tomatoes” and “A Dynamixel motor is the best way to drive the robot.” The result of this partnership between humans and AI is a robotic arm that can harvest tomatoes.
ChatGPT as a Researcher
The researchers found the collaborative design process to be positive and enriching.
“However, we did find that our role as engineers shifted toward performing more technical tasks,” says Stella.
The researchers also explored the varying degrees of cooperation between humans and Large Language Models (LLM), of which ChatGPT is one. In the most extreme scenario, AI provides all the input to the robot design, and the human blindly follows it. In this case, the LLM acts as the researcher and engineer, while the human acts as the manager, in charge of specifying the design objectives.
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