New work from Carnegie Mellon University has enabled robots to learn household chores by watching videos of people performing everyday tasks in their homes. The research could help improve the utility of robots in the home, allowing them to assist people with tasks like cooking and cleaning. Two robots successfully learned 12 tasks including opening a drawer, oven door and lid; taking a pot off the stove; and picking up a telephone, vegetable or can of soup.
Current methods of training robots require either the manual demonstration of tasks by humans or extensive training in a simulated environment. Both are time consuming and prone to failure. The new model eliminates the necessity of human demonstrations as well as the need for the robot to operate within an identical environment. Like WHIRL, the robot still requires practice to master a task. The team’s research showed it can learn a new task in as little as 25 minutes.
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