MIT Robot Learns How to Play Jenga

Machine-learning approach could help robots assemble cellphones and other small parts in a manufacturing line.

MIT Engineers have developed a Robot which can learn and play the game of Jenga.

In the game of Jenga — Swahili for “build” — 54 rectangular blocks are stacked in 18 layers of three blocks each, with the blocks in each layer oriented perpendicular to the blocks below. The aim of the game is to carefully extract a block and place it at the top of the tower, thus building a new level, without toppling the entire structure.

To program a robot to play Jenga, traditional machine-learning schemes might require capturing everything that could possibly happen between a block, the robot, and the tower — an expensive computational task requiring data from thousands if not tens of thousands of block-extraction attempts.

Instead, the MIT researchers have developed a Tactile Learning System to make the Jenga Robot in data-efficient way.

The robot, developed by MIT engineers, is equipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a force-sensing wrist cuff, and an external camera, all of which it uses to see and feel the tower and its individual blocks.

As the robot carefully pushes against a block, a computer takes in visual and tactile feedback from its camera and cuff, and compares these measurements to moves that the robot previously made. It also considers the outcomes of those moves — specifically, whether a block, in a certain configuration and pushed with a certain amount of force, was successfully extracted or not. In real-time, the robot then “learns” whether to keep pushing or move to a new block, in order to keep the tower from falling.

This tactile learning system can be used in applications beyond Jenga, especially in tasks that need careful physical interaction, including separating recyclable objects from landfill trash and assembling consumer products.

News Source: MIT News Science Robotics