Human children learn a lot just by watching their parents. Now AI researchers are creating robots that can do the same thing.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Shikhar Bahl, Deepak Pathak, and Abhinav Gupta developed the In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning (WHIRL) algorithm to teach robots to perform tasks by observing people.
The team added a camera and their alogrithm to an off-the-shelf robot. The robot watched as a researcher opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the location of the fridge and more, analyzing this data and readying itself to mimic what the human had done. After a few hours of practice, the robot succeeded and opened the door.
Eventually the robot learned more than 20 tasks, from opening and closing appliances, cabinet doors and drawers to putting a lid on a pot, pushing in a chair, and even taking a garbage bag out of the can. Each time, the robot watched a human complete the task once and then went about practicing and learning to accomplish the task on its own.
“Instead of waiting for robots to be programmed or trained to successfully complete different tasks before deploying them into people’s homes, this technology allows us to deploy the robots and have them learn how to complete tasks, all the while adapting to their environments and improving solely by watching,” Pathak commented.