Category: Robotics

Learning Tabletop Object Manipulation by Imitation

In what is sure to be a contributing factor in the robot uprising, scientists are attempting to teach robots how to manipulate objects by helping them imitate object manipulation performed by others:

Given external observations of demonstrations on object manipulations, we believe that two underlying problems to address in learning by imitation is 1) segment a given demonstration into skills that can be individually learned and reused, and 2) formulate the correct RL (Reinforcement Learning) problem that only considers the relevant aspects of each skill so that the policy for each skill can be effectively learned. Previous works made certain progress in this direction, but none has taken private information into account.

robotic arm photo

Photo by Dan Ruscoe

Following Robots

A recent study to find out if people would follow a robot or take an exit they can see offered a surprising result. In an emergency, it appears likely people would follow a robot over taking an obvious exit, even if the robot seems to malfunction.

In the emergency study, Robinette’s team used a modified Pioneer P3-AT, a robot that looks like a small bin with wheels and has lit-up foam arms to point. Each participant would individually follow the robot along a hallway until it pointed to the room they were to enter. They would then fill in a survey to rate the robot’s navigation skills and read a magazine article. The emergency was simulated with artificial smoke and a First Alert smoke detector.

A total of 26 of the 30 participants chose to follow the robot during the emergency. Of the remaining four, two were thrown out of the study for unrelated reasons, and the other two never left the room.

Science Robotics Journal

Coming soon from Science Magazine, the journal Science Robotics.

Science Robotics will be available for subscription beginning with the 2017 rate year. The journal will be available to individuals and institutions through a free trial from launch until the end of the year. For information about free trials please contact scienceonline@aaas.org.

I believe I’ll be getting this one for me and my older son to peruse.