Consumer robots can now use AI to learn how to use objects that the robot has not encountered before. This learning capability is being pioneered by the University of Massachusetts Amherst using a robot called UMass Mobile Manipulator or UMan.
UMan experiments with objects and once it identifies an object's moving parts it then conducts any number of experiments to learn the optimum ways of using it to perform tasks.
"You can imagine a baby playing with a toy and pulling the different parts and seeing what moves how," says lead author and graduate student Dov Katz, who did the work with Oliver Brock, a professor of computer science.
"One of the challenges in robotics is having [a robot] act intelligently, even when it doesn't know the shape of the object," says Andrew Ng, a computer scientist at Stanford University who works on robotic gripping.
"I think their work is an important step in this direction," says Ng. "Previously, if someone wants a robot to use a pair of scissors, they will write a lot of software [defining] what scissors are and how the two blades move relative to each other. In contrast, Katz and Brock propose a completely new approach, where the robot plays with a pair of scissors by itself and figures out how the two blades are connected to each other."
Once UMan is linked to Cloud Computing it will be able to dialogue with humans and have embedded instruction to seek a particular object to perform a task. The connotations could be mind blogging as UMan interacts with humans whilst also manipulating objects at the same time. You could now imagine UMan become the house butler, bottle washer and nurse! And of course you would give your UMan a decent name (refer to blog reference AI 6).
