Alphabet Inc.’s robotics unit Intrinsic Innovation LLC said today it’s working with the manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., better known as Foxconn, to explore possibilities for the mass deployment of robots on its assembly lines.

The two companies have just created a multiphased joint venture that aims to design and develop a new generation of more intelligent and flexible robots that can perform more complex tasks in the manufacturing industry – including many that can presently be done only by humans.

Intrinsic is a robotics software developer owned by Google LLC’s parent company that was launched in 2021. Its goal is to unlock the potential of robotics for millions of businesses by making the technology more cost-effective and flexible. To do that, it’s developing software that allows robots to be programmed and adapted to perform more intelligent tasks than are currently possible.

The company sees AI as the enabler of this vision, and to that end it has created a number of advanced models that can act as the “brains” of robots, allowing them to “see” their surroundings, identify objects and obstacles, estimate distances and so on, so they can work flexibly and safely in physical environments.

A key aim of Intrinsic is to make robots easy to deploy and operate, so that they can be used by businesses that lack the technical expertise to program them. It’s also exploring the idea of a “robotics-as-a-service” model, which will allow companies without significant financial resources to utilize robots.

AI robots to reshape future factories

Manufacturing is an obvious target for more intelligent robots. While many manufacturing operations are already heavily automated, the industry is still reliant on significant manual production processes for more complex tasks. In addition, the robotics systems in use today tend to be extremely rigid, hard-coded to perform very specific tasks.

This means robots generally only perform predictable, predetermined and high-volume tasks, and lack the ability to handle process variability or optimize processes based on real time data and feedback. Because of this, manufacturers are often slow to respond to shifts in demand or supply chain constraints, Foxconn said.

The joint venture aims to change this, and it will do so by combining Intrinsic’s artificial intelligence capabilities with Foxconn’s “Smart Manufacturing” platform, the companies said. To begin with, they’ll focus on designing and building more adaptive and reusable robotics systems with AI-enabled intelligence, so they can start automating more complex tasks. A key element of this collaboration will be Intrinsic Flowstate, a web-based development platform for building and deploying advanced robotics software, and the Intrinsic Vision Model, which allows robots to understand the world visually.

Ultimately, the partners want to develop and test robotics systems for a wide variety of manufacturing tasks, spanning assembly, inspection, machine tending and logistics, so they can bring automation to operations once considered too complex for anything but humans.

Intrinsic Chief Executive Wendy Tan White said Foxconn will help her company bring the value of AI to the physical world. “By marrying Intrinsic’s expertise in AI-driven robotics software with Foxconn’s deep expertise, we will accelerate the adoption of AI where it is most needed and valuable today,” she promised.

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