All about artificial intelligence

The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) has revolutionized the way robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as preparing breakfast, through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), as seen in a video released by the company to demonstrate the innovative training technology. .

In an environment they describe as “a robotics kindergarten,” TRI researchers are implementing technologies that promise to eliminate the need for hundreds of hours of complex programming and troubleshooting.

The key to the success of this process is providing the robots with a sense of touch. Equipped with a kind of “soft thumb,” robots can “feel” what you are doing, providing important information to carry out difficult tasks that would otherwise be difficult to perform based on vision alone.

The process begins with a human “teacher” demonstrating a series of skills to the robots. Then, over the course of a few hours, the AI ​​model learns these skills in the background. “It’s common for us to teach a robot in the afternoon, let it learn overnight, and the next morning we’re faced with a new functional behavior,” Burchville adds.

Researchers are committed to creating “large behavior models” or LBCs (large behavior models) for robots. These models, similar to large language models, also called LLMs (large language models, in English) used to create human text, will learn through observation and be able to perform new tasks that have not been explicitly taught before.

This approach is revolutionary for robotics, explains Ross Tedrick, a professor of robotics at MIT and vice president of robotics research at TRI. Using this process, the researchers claim to have successfully trained more than 60 difficult skills, including “pouring liquids, using tools, and manipulating deformable objects.” They aim to increase this number to 1,000 by the end of 2024.

It is worth noting that other technology companies, such as Google and Tesla, are also exploring similar approaches. Just like the Toyota researchers, their robots use the experience they gain to infer how to perform tasks.

In theory, AI-trained robots could, in the future, perform tasks with little or no instruction, similar to the direction that would be given to a human (“clean up that leak” for example).