Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
VirtualHome: Teaching Robots To Do Chores Around The House
Before we can have Robert Heinlein's wonderful home robot Flexible Frank (from his 1956 classic The Door into Summer...
...We need to train them. Hence, VirtualHome, the activity simulator for teaching household tasks to robots.
Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? Answer: any work a human being does around a house. He didn't have to play cards, make love, eat or sleep, but he did have to clean up after the card game, cook, make beds, and tend babies - at least he had to keep track of a baby's breathing and call someone if it changes.
(VirtualHome video: Teaching Robots To Do Chores)
In this paper, we are interested in modeling complex activities that occur in a typical household. We propose to use programs, i.e., sequences of atomic actions and interactions, as a high level representation of complex tasks. Programs are interesting because they provide a non-ambiguous representation of a task, and allow agents to execute them. However, nowadays, there is no database providing this type of information. Towards this goal, we first crowd-source programs for a variety of activities that happen in people’s homes, via a game-like interface used for teaching kids how to code. Using the collected dataset, we show how we can learn to extract programs directly from natural language descriptions or from videos. We then implement the most common atomic (inter)actions in the Unity3D game engine, and use our programs to “drive” an artificial agent to execute tasks in a simulated household environment. Our VirtualHome simulator allows us to create a large activity video dataset with rich ground-truth, enabling training and testing of video understanding models. We further showcase examples of our agent performing tasks in our VirtualHome based on language descriptions.(From VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs [pdf])
I just love the idea of a household robot, maybe one of the following will be perfected in my lifetime:
- Twendy-One Robot Is Your Humanoid Helper
- REEM-B Robot Autonomous Helper Video
- Care-O-Bot Robot Does Chores One-Handed
- Basil Reification Robot
- Toyota Delivery Robot Home Helper
- ATLAS Robot Now Does Housework!
- Elon Musk et. al. OpenAI Household Robot
- Housekeeping Robots Easy To Imagine, Tough To Make
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/7/2018)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )
Related News Stories - (" Robotics ")
Humanoid Boxing Robot KO's Opponent - It's A Knockout!
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.' - Aldo Giunta, 1957
Students Vie For Lunar Regolith Mining Robot Prize
'About time you got here,' the astronaut said. - Pournelle and Niven, 1981.
Robot Hand Creeps Along, Separate From It's Owner
'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...' - Philip K. Dick, 1955.
Korean Exoskeleton Suit F1 Helps You Put It On
'Better late than never.'
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Robotic Barber Programmed With a Number of Styles
'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
Humanoid Boxing Robot KO's Opponent - It's A Knockout!
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
Caterpillar Electric Mining Loader Not Yet Ready For Moon
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
Centipede Robots Down On The Farm
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
Anthropic's Claude AI Creates Legal Citation From Whole Cloth
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
Students Vie For Lunar Regolith Mining Robot Prize
'About time you got here,' the astronaut said.
'They Erased My Memory' Says Ariana Grande
'...using a neutralizing electronic impulse.'
Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space
'...the Hole is something like a vortex or a whirlpool?'
Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
DARPA Wants 'Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
Robot Hand Creeps Along, Separate From It's Owner
'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
Korean Exoskeleton Suit F1 Helps You Put It On
'Better late than never.'
Have AI Researchers Given Up On 'Bio-Babies'?
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
Bunker Busters and Bore-Pellets
'The first revelation of the new Soviet bore-pellets.'
'Spikeless' Brand Swizzle Stick Detects Spiked Drinks
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
