A robot that can cook isn’t that big a deal. After all, isn’t that technically what we’re looking at when we watch a factory machine create those perfect rows or Hershey’s Kisses? Likewise underwhelming: a robot that can cook anything you tell it to… as long as you’ve programmed it beforehand.
On the other hand, the notion of a robot that can not only learn to cook, but learn to cook without the help of a programmer, is kind of a big deal.
Researchers at the University of Maryland recently published findings in a paper entitled “Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by ‘Watching’ Unconstrained Videos from the World Wide Web” after, well, teaching a robot how to cook by watching YouTube.
There are obvious implications, of course: chef’s assistants that don’t need to be coded to know how to help in the kitchen, for instance. What this project really represents, however, is a tremendous leap in computer learning. The researchers developed a system by which a robot can identify the ingredients and the steps shown in the videos, and then reproduce the results in the kitchen with a 68% success rate.
Computer vision has grown closer and closer to human capability in recent years, but researchers have had a hard time getting robots to use this advanced ability for recognition to actually inform their actions. In short: we’re not just talking about robots that can cook, we’re talking about robots that can learn in the same way that humans learn, and then take what they’ve learned and teach it to other robots through software updates and cloud storage.
The study was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which should make for some obvious implications: robots that can be trained for dangerous jobs currently held by humans. We may be only a few years away from fully automated rescue units that can bail human soldiers (or other robots) out of dangerous combat situations without putting any other humans at risk.
Moving away from military applications, by 2020 we might be wondering whether or not we really trust robots to serve as nursing home assistants, or if it’s fair that robot sewer workers are taking jobs away from human beings. ASIMO recently met with Barack Obama for a chat and a game of soccer, but the truth is that ASIMO is more a marvel of architecture than of artificial intelligence. ASIMO didn’t learn how to kick a soccer ball by watching the World Cup, but by having kicking animations coded directly into his software.
We’ve seen similar breakthroughs in, of all things, Nintendo games, with Mario AI competitions showing up, and various projects like this one, teaching Mario how to fend for himself in the original Super Mario Bros. game.
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