Engineering household robots to have a little common sense
From wiping up spills to serving up food, robots are being taught to carry out increasingly complicated household tasks. Many such home-bot trainees are learning through imitation; they are programmed to copy the motions that a human physically guides them through.
New research from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute can help robots feel layers of cloth rather than relying on computer vision tools to only see it. The work could allow robots to assist people with household tasks like folding laundry.
To assist humans with household chores and other everyday manual tasks, robots should be able to effectively manipulate objects that vary in composition, shape and size. The manipulation skills of robots have improved significantly over the past few years, in part due to the development of increasingly sophisticated cameras and…
Engineers aim to give robots a bit of common sense when faced with situations that push them off their trained path, so they can self-correct after missteps and carry on with their chores. The team's method connects robot motion data with the common sense knowledge of large language models, or…