Robots That Teach Each Other

Many of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in warehouses, assisting bedridden patients, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognize and easily handle common objects. People generally have no trouble folding socks or picking up water glasses, because we’ve gone through “a big data collection process” called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown University. For robots to do the same types of routine tasks, they also need access to reams of data on how to grasp and manipulate objects. Where does that data come from? Typically it has come from painstaking programming. But ideally, robots could get some information from each other.



That’s the theory behind Tellex’s “Million Object Challenge.” The goal is for research robots around the world to learn how to spot and handle simple items from bowls to bananas, upload their data to the cloud, and allow other robots to analyze and use the information.

Tellex’s lab in Providence, Rhode Island, has the air of a playful preschool. On the day I visit, a Baxter robot, an industrial machine produced by Rethink Robotics, stands among oversized blocks, scanning a small hairbrush. It moves its right arm noisily back and forth above the object, taking multiple pictures with its camera and measuring depth with an infrared sensor. Then, with its two-pronged gripper, it tries different grasps that might allow it to lift the brush. Once it has the object in the air, it shakes it to make sure the grip is secure. If so, the robot has learned how to pick up one more thing.

The robot can work around the clock, frequently with a different object in each of its grippers. Tellex and her graduate student John Oberlin have gathered—and are now sharing—data on roughly 200 items, starting with such things as a child’s shoe, a plastic boat, a rubber duck, a garlic press and other cookware, and a sippy cup that originally belonged to her three-year-old son. Other scientists can contribute their robots’ own data, and Tellex hopes that together they will build up a library of information on how robots should handle a million different items. Eventually, robots confronting a crowded shelf will be able to “identify the pen in front of them and pick it up,” Tellex says.

Read More: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600768/10-breakthrough-technologies-2016-robots-that-teach-each-other/