SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Robots Encountering Socks
from NPR
Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls "Apprentice Robots." They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them
exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given "perception mechanisms" to analyze what they've seen, then "planning and simulation" mechanisms, to copy
tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn.
In this case, the robot in the video has to grasp the correct (open) end of each sock, even though they are pointed in different directions, and then put
them on the post. Apparently Abbeel's robots can study a person or even a series of photographs and figure out how to do this, sometimes after only ten or so
demonstrations.
Technology Review magazine says "Abbeel taught one robot how to fold laundry by giving it some general rules about how fabric behaves, and then
showed it around 100 images of clothing so it could analyze how that particular clothing was likely to move as it was handled." No live human instruction.
Just pictures.
Read more...
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