Virtual home teaches robots to do household chores in a virtual world

02 Jun 2018 POSTED BY Vishal

3,000 activities incorporated

To create Virtual Home, the researchers incorporated in the system nearly 3,000 programs of activities, complete with their corresponding broken down subtasks. The team then devised a way to illustrate the system through a 3D Sims-like world where artificial agents can be seen executing these activities in eight different rooms of a house.

The premise behind the project is the fact that robots require explicit instructions to complete even the most simple of tasks. For instance, an instruction of “turn off the light” would require additional inputs or subtasks such as “spot the light switch,” “walk to the light switch” and “press the light switch.”

“Describing actions as computer programs has the advantage of providing clear and unambiguous descriptions of all the steps needed to complete a task,” explained MIT PhD student Xavier Puig and lead author on the paper. “These programs can instruct a robot or a virtual character, and can also be used as a representation for complex tasks with simpler actions.”

Currently, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is also working on a robot-teaching virtual environment called Thor. This system defines objects, their corresponding uses and the actions robot can undertake with them so that the machines learn to complete tasks through trial and error.

Source : Interesting Engineering