Swiss giant ABB has decided that programming industrial robots is too easy, and has added a generative AI assistant to its RobotStudio package. Engineers can now communicate with the program in natural language instead of writing code manually. It seems that soon it will be enough to tell the robot to set up: "Listen, just make everything work, okay?"

The new "natural interface" allows you to describe tasks in ordinary words. For example, you can ask the system to "create a welding path for this part" instead of programming each point of the trajectory yourself. Although, to be honest, most engineers talk to their computers all the time anyway — they just didn't understand them before.

ABB pays special attention to simulation — the AI assistant is able to optimize production processes in a virtual environment. Now you can simulate how the robot will perform the task and get recommendations for improvement — for example, "do not turn so sharply, otherwise you will drop the part." It is a pity that such an advisor was not available to the first industrial robots 50 years ago — perhaps they would have broken down less.

It is interesting that the system uses ready-made language models, which were further trained on the ABB technical documentation. This means that AI understands not only human speech, but also specific terms like "kinematics with parallel structure" — although it may sometimes want to translate it into a normal language.

Developers are modestly silent about how often AI makes mistakes in its recommendations. They are unlikely to advertise cases where the system suggests installing a robot where it cannot physically fit, or programming a movement that violates the laws of physics.

As noted on jobtorob.com perhaps a new profession will appear soon — "translator from human to robotic", which will help engineers correctly formulate queries for capricious AI systems. Although, given the pace of technology development, it is possible that in a couple of years this intermediary will no longer be needed.

The funny thing about this story is that ABB positions innovation as a way to "democratize" robotics. They say that now even non-professionals will be able to program robots. It's scary to imagine what will happen when some middle-level manager decides to "slightly improve" the work of the production line with the help of a couple of verbal commands.

However, one cannot deny the practical benefits of the development — perhaps it will really save engineers time on routine operations. The main thing is that accuracy is not lost in the pursuit of simplicity. After all, an industrial robot is not a ChatGPT that can just come up with non—existent facts, but expensive equipment that can mess things up with incorrect programming.