I feel like this is a political move between Hyundai and Google (favour by Google).
BD sat back on traditional programming/light ML techniques for ages whilst transformers went wild and it's only now that they're like "oh shit".
Hence the partnership with Google; BD lacks the capabilities otherwise. I bet their internal marketing departments did a bit of hand shaking to spin this piece as a favour for Hyundai/BD. Because from Google's (and our) perspectives - reading a gauge etc isn't that impressive and multimodal transformers solved that years ago, OpenCV many years before that also. But to BD it's impressive/a desperate grasp of "we swear we're using modern ML now! Yes our robot dances were sequenced and took dozens of takes but now we'll start doing it for real, we swear!"
There's an exceptional amount of work to get a transformer to learn such a thing from scratch even if you had data from all the different cameras and basements and lighting conditions out there. Mentioning opencv is just silly
The entire point is that robotics lives in the full complexity of the real world and therefore cannot afford to do all that for every little corner of every factory, engine room, warehouse, aircraft, etc.
Robots are finally using ML because ML is finally useful!
The gauge is an excellent example partly because of its mundanity. There's a huge number of these little tasks everywhere in real environments. It does an incredible job at adapting to the specifics of its camera resolution, lighting, and the gauge labels to do the task.
BD sat back on traditional programming/light ML techniques for ages whilst transformers went wild and it's only now that they're like "oh shit".
Hence the partnership with Google; BD lacks the capabilities otherwise. I bet their internal marketing departments did a bit of hand shaking to spin this piece as a favour for Hyundai/BD. Because from Google's (and our) perspectives - reading a gauge etc isn't that impressive and multimodal transformers solved that years ago, OpenCV many years before that also. But to BD it's impressive/a desperate grasp of "we swear we're using modern ML now! Yes our robot dances were sequenced and took dozens of takes but now we'll start doing it for real, we swear!"