Robots are gaining a revolutionary power—the ability to teach themselves new skills. They have learned to play Ping-Pong, move boulders, and even tie shoelaces. James Somers reports from Google DeepMind and beyond.
Our intelligence is physical long before it is anything else. Most of our brain mass exists to coördinate the activity of our bodies. A disproportionate amount of the primary motor cortex, a region of the brain that controls movement, is devoted to body parts that move in more complicated ways. An especially large portion controls the face and lips; a similarly large portion controls the hands.
is one of the simplest and cheapest sets of robotic arms out there, yet operators have pushed the boundaries of robotic dexterity with it. “You can peel eggs,” Tompson said. Zhao had managed to fish a contact lens out of its case and place it on a toy frog’s eye. In the early days of Google Books, roomfuls of contractors turned millions of pages by hand in order to unlock the knowledge inside.
, but it’s far more expressive. Of course, if robots have to be taught every skill by hand, it’s going to take a long time, and a lot of exosuits, for them to become useful. When I want to bake bread, I don’t ask Paul and Prue from “The Great British Bake Off” to come over and pilot my arms; I just watch an episode of the show. “It’s the holy grail, right?” Tompson, from the
style. But the operators got tired after thirty minutes, and there was something un-ergonomic about operating a hand that was only sort of like your own. Different operators solved the task in different ways; the policy they trained had only a two-per-cent success rate. The range of possible moves was too large. The robot didn’t know what to imitate. The team turned instead to reinforcement learning.
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