Alphabet is using its prototype robots to clean up the area around Google’s offices.

What does Google’s parent company Alphabet want with robots? Well, it would like them to clean up around the office, for a start.

The company revealed today that its Everyday Robots Project — a group under its experimental X labs tasked with developing “a general-purpose learning robot” — has brought some of its prototype machines out of the lab and onto Google’s Bay Area campuses to do some light custodial duties.

In a blog post, Everyday Robot’s chief robot officer Hans Peter Brndmo said, “We are presently operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of helpful jobs around our offices.” “The same robot that sorts rubbish can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and even learn to open doors using the same gripper that grasps cups.”

Alphabet is using its prototype robots to clean up the area around Google’s offices.

These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There’s a “head” on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation.

In 2019, the Everyday Robot team will be in charge. The company (like with many other startups and competitors) is betting that machine learning will ultimately allow robots to operate in “unstructured” contexts like homes and offices. You might also like Apple reportedly wants to launch a self-driving EV in 2025 with a custom chip

Right now, we’re very good at building machines that can carry out repetitive jobs in a factory, but we’re stumped when trying to get them to replicate simple tasks like cleaning up a kitchen or folding laundry.

Consider this: you’ve probably seen Boston Dynamics robots do backflips and dance to The Rolling Stones, but have you ever seen one carry out the garbage? It’s difficult to persuade a machine to manipulate never-before-seen objects in a novel situation (something people do all the time). This is the issue Alphabet is attempting to resolve.

Alphabet is using its prototype robots to clean up the area around Google’s offices.

Is it going to? Well, maybe one day — if company execs feel it’s worth burning through millions of dollars in research to achieve this goal. Certainly, though, humans are going to be cheaper and more efficient than robots for these jobs in the foreseeable future. The update today from Everyday Robot is neat, but it’s far from a leap forward. You can see from the GIFs that Alphabet shared of its robots that they’re still slow and awkward, carrying out tasks inexpertly and at a glacial pace.

However, the fact that the robots are being tested “in the wild” rather than in the lab is still significant. Consider Alphabet’s machines in comparison to Samsung’s Bot Handy, a similar-looking tower-and-arm bot that the company demonstrated at CES last year, allegedly pouring wine and loading a dishwasher. At the very least, Bot Handy seemed to be doing these tasks, but it was actually just presenting a demonstration. Who knows how capable this robot is in the real world, if at all? At the very least, Alphabet is discovering this for itself.