In the basement of MIT's Building
3, a robot is carefully contemplating its next move. It gently pokes at a tower
of blocks, looking for the best block to extract without toppling the tower, in
a solitary, slow-moving, yet surprisingly agile game of Jenga. The robot,
developed by MIT engineers, is equipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a
force-sensing wrist cuff, and an external camera, all of which it uses to see
and feel the tower and its individual blocks.
As the robot carefully pushes
against a block, a computer takes in visual and tactile feedback from its
camera and cuff, and compares these measurements to moves that the robot
previously made. It also considers the outcomes of those moves, whether a
block, in a certain configuration and pushed with a certain amount of force,
was successfully extracted or not. In real-time, the robot then learns whether
to keep pushing or move to a new block, in order to keep the tower from
falling.
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