In the Future, Warehouse Robots Will Learn on Their Own
- 7 years ago
In the Future, Warehouse Robots Will Learn on Their Own
Mr. Mahler and the rest of the Berkeley team trained the machine by showing it hundreds of purely digital objects, and after
that training, it could pick up items that weren’t represented in its digital data set.
“It figures out the best way to grab each object, right from the middle of the clutter,” said Jeff Mahler,
one of the researchers developing the robot inside a lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
What’s more, when the team built simulated piles of random objects
and fed those into the neural network, it could learn to lift items from physical piles, too.
Researchers at places like Northeastern University, Carnegie Mellon University, Google and OpenAI — the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk — are developing similar techniques, and many believe
that such machine learning will ultimately allow robots to master a much wider array of tasks, including manufacturing.
And when the team plugged this neural network into the two-armed robot, it could do the same with physical objects.
Like Siemens and the Toyota Research Institute, Amazon is helping to fund the work at Berkeley, and it has an acute need for this kind of robot.
Mr. Mahler and the rest of the Berkeley team trained the machine by showing it hundreds of purely digital objects, and after
that training, it could pick up items that weren’t represented in its digital data set.
“It figures out the best way to grab each object, right from the middle of the clutter,” said Jeff Mahler,
one of the researchers developing the robot inside a lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
What’s more, when the team built simulated piles of random objects
and fed those into the neural network, it could learn to lift items from physical piles, too.
Researchers at places like Northeastern University, Carnegie Mellon University, Google and OpenAI — the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk — are developing similar techniques, and many believe
that such machine learning will ultimately allow robots to master a much wider array of tasks, including manufacturing.
And when the team plugged this neural network into the two-armed robot, it could do the same with physical objects.
Like Siemens and the Toyota Research Institute, Amazon is helping to fund the work at Berkeley, and it has an acute need for this kind of robot.