Select date
Robots That Learn by Watching “how-to” Videos Could Soon Do All Your Chores
By Study Finds
Robots could soon be tidying up our messy bedrooms, just like on The Jetsons. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are teaching machines how to carry out everyday household chores the same way plenty of people learn these life skills — by watching “how-to” videos.
The team says their work is a major step towards artificial intelligence (AI) assisting humans with everything from cooking to cleaning. Two machines successfully learned 12 jobs including opening drawers, oven doors, and lids. The robots also took a pot off the stove, picked up a vegetable and can of soup, and answered the telephone.
“The robot can learn where and how humans interact with different objects through watching videos,” says Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science. “From this knowledge, we can train a model that enables two robots to complete similar tasks in varied environments.”
Current methods of training robots require either the manual demonstration of tasks by humans or extensive training in a simulated environment. Both can be time consuming and prone to failure. The CMU team previously demonstrated a novel method in which robots learn from observing humans complete these simple tasks. However, WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning, required human participants to complete the task in the same environment as the robot.
Now, Vision-Robotics Bridge (VRB) builds on and improves WHIRL. It eliminates the necessity of human demonstrations as well as the need for the robot to operate within an identical environment. Like WHIRL, the robot still requires practice to master a task. Experiments revealed that robots can learn a new task in as little as 25 minutes.
