TECH NEWS – The Cupertino-based company has the potential to create a robot that can perform household tasks and move around the house, but it’s not likely to happen this decade.

We’ve already reported that Project Titan, the self-driving car project, has been shelved (and there was talk of layoffs as a result), so Apple has the capacity for other experiments. It’s no surprise that the company is sniffing around robotics as a way to enter new markets. There is nothing wrong with that, but as it is a completely new technology, still very futuristic today, one should not be too optimistic about Apple’s capabilities.

According to Mike Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, there are secret projects being worked on by teams specializing in hardware engineering and artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean they’ll quickly come up with a self-driving robot that can do more sophisticated jobs with precision: “The company has skunk-works teams within its hardware engineering and AI organizations working on robotics. One recent project involved a home robot that could follow a person around the house. Some involved in the effort have even postulated that Apple could get into humanoid technology and build a machine that could do household chores. But such advances are probably a decade away, and it doesn’t appear that Apple has even agreed to go in that direction,” Gurman said. Skunk works tend to be military-related, top-secret projects.

If a few people from different departments are working on the walking (possibly table-top) robot, Apple hasn’t gone all-in. Rather, it is slowly, incrementally improving its products while focusing more on keeping the iPhone, the company’s biggest moneymaker, in a dominant position. However, we can expect slower but steadier work from the company. It will get results, but maybe not until 2030.

Source: WCCFTech