Robot Hand Learns How To Learn From Babies

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.'"

RobotCub - open source hardware

[rich_from_shadow]

RobotCub is particularly interesting because all the design is being posted on their website, so anyone with a spare 200kEuro can build one. It's an EU-funded project, and it's good to see government money widening the pool of Open Source stuff - see www.robotcub.org [robotcub.org]

Old News

[Agilus]

Seven years ago, when I started grad school at UMass Amherst, they were talking about this stuff in the robotics lab. This is hardly new stuff.

One of the ideas I got out of their talk about their research was that babies start using their muscles gradually, with only a few degrees of motion to start, and moving up from there. For instance, you'll notice that when a baby starts using his hands, he just grabs things for a while. There is no fine grained control of the fingers, and even the control necessary to consciously release whatever he grabbed doesn't come until later.

Re:Related

[Stefanwulf]

Anyone know what I would need to learn and do in order to get involved on a theoretical or practical level?

The first thing I'd do is get a feel for the field. MIT's OpenCourseWare has some interesting stuff like Intro to Robotics [mit.edu]. I've actually also found wikipedia to be helpful in determining the areas of specialization within a field, and some of the basic jargon that has developed. There will be certain levels of math, programming, and possibly physics or electrical engineering knowledge that you'll need to have, and I've found one of the best ways to get a feel for those is to go to a local university library and pull some papers/conference proceedings on the subject. Read a few of them (from different people, and preferably different conferences/journals) that have titles which interest you, and take note of things like the level of mathematics or engineering knowledge being applied. If you don't understand it, don't be discouraged...it's just a technical language used in papers, and it's not terribly hard to learn, especially when you're learning it within a directly applied framework. It's worth it too, being able to quickly and easily read the papers being published lets you benefit from a huge realm of work that other people are already doing.

On a hobbyist level of involvement, my impression is that's it's far cheaper to get involved with the AI/control side of robotics than it is the hardware design. There are a number of freely/cheeply available robot simulators - some are listed at http://www.robotcafe.com/dir/Software/Simulators/ [robotcafe.com] and http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Robotics/Software/Simulation/ [google.com]. These let you play with the control systems without having to worry about constructing/purchasing the hardware. Alternatively, for less than $1000 US, you can set up a fairly cheap robotics lab with an AIBO, a wireless connection to your computer, and software like Tekkotsu [cmu.edu] or URBI [urbiforge.com].

And of course, if some aspect of it really catches your interest and you want to pursue it professionally, your best bet is probably to start looking at studying with the academic departments which have been publishing the papers/materials you've enjoyed the most, or which have strong programs in that area of the field.