For many people, household chores are a dreaded, inescapable part of life that we often put off or do with little care. But what if a robot assistant could help lighten the load?
Recently, computer scientists have been working on teaching machines to do a wider range of tasks around the house. In a new paper spearheaded by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the University of Toronto, researchers demonstrate “VirtualHome,” a system that can simulate detailed household tasks and then have artificial “agents” execute them, opening up the possibility of one day teaching robots to do such tasks.
The team trained the system using nearly 3,000 programs of various activities, which are further broken down into subtasks for the computer to understand. A simple task like “making coffee,” for example, would also include the step “grabbing a cup.” The researchers demonstrated VirtualHome in a 3-D world inspired by the Sims video game.
The team’s artificial agent can execute 1,000 of these interactions in the Sims-style world, with eight different scenes including a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and home office.
The project was co-developed by CSAIL and the University of Toronto alongside researchers from McGill University and the University of Ljubljana. It will be presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, which takes place this month in Salt Lake City.
Unlike humans, robots need more explicit instructions to complete easy tasks; they can’t just infer and reason with ease.
News Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-csail-teaching-chores-artificial-agent-0530
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