Thanks to a prompt from researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands and the Swiss technical university École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI, has created its first robot.

On the path to developing the robot, the researchers first asked the chatbot what it thought might be the greatest future challenges for humanity, which ChatGPT instantly identified as the food supply.

Wanting to design a robot that would prove useful, further discussions with ChatGPT helped the researchers to arrive at the goal for developing a tomato-harvesting robot.

Source: Adrien Buttier/EPFL

Through a back and forth between the researchers and ChatGPT, the design for the tomato-harvesting robotic arm came to fruition with ChatGPT offering suggestions such as incorporating a gripper composed of silicone or rubber to avoid crushing tomatoes and identifying a Dynamixel motor as the ideal way to drive the robot. This back and forth resulted in the tomato-harvesting robot.

Through this process, the researchers reported that their role as engineers was altered by the interaction, reportedly becoming more focused on performing technical tasks while the Large Language Models (LLM) — of which ChatGPT is one — behaved as both researcher and engineer while the human behaved as the manager who specifies the design objectives.

An article detailing the research, “How can LLMs transform the robotic design process?,” appears in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.