Humans, most of us anyway, can move a coffee cup without spilling the liquid inside. But such delicate tasks — how to balance a plateful of food, or how to place an egg crate in the fridge without smashing the contents — are, bizarrely, hard lessons to teach a robot. A new training technique being perfected at Cornell University will let regular humans easily train household robots to perform dangerous tasks by simply guiding their arms. Recently, the researchers trained a robot and taught it not to harm a person standing nearby with a pointy object, a knife. Many of the tasks that look simple to us are very hard for robots. Not being clumsy, which most robots are, is a hard problem to solve and a very hard thing to teach. Today, most robots learn their moves from experts. They can be commanded by pre-written programming — which may not be universal for all actions — or trained to copy movements after watching precise expert demonstrations. Cornells new learning technique will let future folks at home train their household helper robot to use a knife without perfect instructions. When a person moves its arm with the knife shaft pointed away from the person standing in front of it, the bot gets the message. Then robot then displays movement options on a screen, so the user can continue to refine the command by sight. When it arrives at the house, people will be able to give feedback to say: I like this, or I don’t like this, the researchers said. Hey robot! Dont walk in front of the TV when its on. Dont overturn the plate thats holding the pizza slices. (But its OK to hold an empty plate upside down!) Safety lessons about how to use knives, as the research team demonstrated in a recent YouTube video, go on the list as well. The work is due to be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Lake Tahoe this December. Dont harm the human. Asimovs first law may be simple enough for us to understand, but a hard one to teach robots. Cornells work could help change that. Guess its time to bring on the knife wielding salad-chopping robots?
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:12:19 +0000
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