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Robot Hand Learns How To Learn From Babies

Posted by Zonk on from the everything-i-need-to-know-i-learned-in-the-comments dept.

jcasman writes "Wired's got a piece on building a better robotic hand at Stanford. The new robot is called Stair 1.0, and scientists are hoping to take a cue from human children for how to teach a robot to learn. 'When a computer fails at a task, it spouts an error message. Babies, on the other hand, just try again a different way, exploring the world by grabbing new objects -- shoving them into their mouths if possible -- to acquire additional data. This built-in drive to explore teaches us how to use our brains and bodies. Now a number of hand-focused roboticists are building machines with the same childlike motivation to explore, fail, and learn through their hands.'"

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Robot grabbing and shoving things in its mouth by JetlagMk2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Am I the only one worried here?

    1. Re:Robot grabbing and shoving things in its mouth by ParaShoot · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Hello human, what are you?"

      *nom nom nom*

  2. About time! by sm62704 · · Score: 3, Funny

    'When a computer fails at a task, it spouts an error message. Babies, on the other hand, just try again a different way, exploring the world by grabbing new objects -- shoving them into their mouths if possible -- to acquire additional data

    Access gives me the most amusing error messages. "Error 3417: there is no message for this error" (the message is real, the number I pulled out of my ass).

    But thinking about it, a robot looking for better data might be a good idea, but a computer? That might worrry me.

    Don't forget that a computer, even one running a robot, is just an alectronic abacus, nothing like a human or any other animal's brain. The temptation is to anthropomorphise.

    -mcgrew

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  3. Related by UbuntuDupe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This reminded me of this video that I favorited on youtube, in which a robot is "brought to life" and then "feels around" to model the world and itself, and then "figures out" how to walk.

    This seems really interesting and something I'd want to work on. Anyone know what I would need to learn and do in order to get involved on a theoretical or practical level?

    --
    Apology to Ubuntu forum.
  4. Re:Not too useful by Nos. · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Simple, you learn how they learn. Children learn alot in the first few years of their life, and the rate at which they learn can be quite astonishing.