Yes, it’s a specially designed machine just for one simple household task; yes, this video is sped up fifty times to make viewing easier; yes, it would cost more than a simple servant to do the same job; yes to all of that . . . but for a machine in 2010 to accomplish this task with objects of different dimension it hasn’t seen before, and which flap around so, suggests that machines not so many years from now will be performing all sorts of labour-saving tasks we’d rather not be doing ourselves.
Which promises to transform life in the Twenty-First Century.
And that’s pretty cool.
So thank the nice people at the UC Berkeley Robotics Lab who designed and built it. [Hat tip Willy S.]
5 comments:
Just to clarify - what does that last line at the end of the video say?
That's cutting-edge technology. That robotic uses an inductive learning algorithm to identify the edges of the towel (computer vision), as described in the paper quoted above in the blog post.
The machine (ie, robot) is generalizing the concept of "object edges" when it learns about them from images of such objects edges that were fed in by the developers of the robot. The shortfall of induction here, is that the robot hasn't seen all of instances of such objects that represents different image edges.
@FF: "...the robot hasn't seen all of instances of such objects that represents different image edges."
No, but the developers have--at least, they've seen a sufficient number to make a firm and programmable generalisation.
That's where induction begins.
This is a comment from the youtube site, hah!
"Mom said I'd never find a girlfriend.
This robot says I'll never need one"
"it’s a specially designed machine just for one simple household task"
Not quite - the robot is based on Willow Garage's PR2 robot, which is intended to be an open-source, general-purpose robot which will make it cheaper and easier to develop and test new robotic hardware and software.
Here's a cool video of another PR2 robot which has been developed to the point where it can open doors, locate power points and plug itself in.
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