Robots To Be Trained Like Infants!

Soon enough. a new race of robots will be would be arriving, a race which can adopt to new environments and control things as per their requirements. An Indo-American researcher, Ashutosh Saxena along with his team at Cornell University Personal Robotics Lab, has developed a method by which the robot will be trained the same way an infant is trained initially to work out its surroundings.

Ashutosh said,”Robots still have a long way to go to learn like humans. We would be really happy if we could build a robot that would even act like a six-month-old baby.” Computers can be ‘trained’, he says, to seek cups of various shapes and sizes and observe what is similar in them. In the same way, a robot can be taught to handle a cup and grasp it correctly. Ashutosh, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus, encountered that placing objects is much more difficult than picking them up. A cup is kept upright on a table, but kept upside down in a dishwasher, so the robot must be thoroughly trained to take such decisions itself, according to a Cornell statement. Ashutosh explained, “We just show the robot some examples and it learns to generalize the placing strategies and applies them to objects that were not seen before. It learns about stability and other criteria for good placing for plates and cups, and when it sees a new object — a bowl — it applies them.”
The computer takes into account all the physical details it can about the environment- the color, texture, nearby objects- and then studies all the characteristics they have in common. During training, they found out that 98 percent of the time, the objects were placed correctly by the robot when it had formerly visited that place. With new objects in a new environments, its accuracy dipped to 95 percent, which is still worthy considering that the thing is totally inhuman.