Robot Combines Vision and Touch To Learn the Game of Jenga (sciencedaily.com) 21
In the basement of MIT's Building 3, a robot is carefully contemplating its next move. It gently pokes at a tower of blocks, looking for the best block to extract without toppling the tower, in a solitary, slow-moving, yet surprisingly agile game of Jenga. From a report: The robot, developed by MIT engineers, is equipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a force-sensing wrist cuff, and an external camera, all of which it uses to see and feel the tower and its individual blocks. As the robot carefully pushes against a block, a computer takes in visual and tactile feedback from its camera and cuff, and compares these measurements to moves that the robot previously made. It also considers the outcomes of those moves -- specifically, whether a block, in a certain configuration and pushed with a certain amount of force, was successfully extracted or not. In real-time, the robot then "learns" whether to keep pushing or move to a new block, in order to keep the tower from falling.
Details of the Jenga-playing robot are published in the journal Science Robotics. Alberto Rodriguez, the Walter Henry Gale Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, says the robot demonstrates something that's been tricky to attain in previous systems: the ability to quickly learn the best way to carry out a task, not just from visual cues, as it is commonly studied today, but also from tactile, physical interactions.
Details of the Jenga-playing robot are published in the journal Science Robotics. Alberto Rodriguez, the Walter Henry Gale Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, says the robot demonstrates something that's been tricky to attain in previous systems: the ability to quickly learn the best way to carry out a task, not just from visual cues, as it is commonly studied today, but also from tactile, physical interactions.
Wow (Score:2)
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" equipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a force-sensing wrist cuff, and an external camera, all of which it uses to see and feel the tower " -Shoot, a guy could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that..
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In the basement of MIT's Building 3
Shoot, a guy could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that..
Just how big is this robot?
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In CA its all about the GUI robot software when learning to code.
Ya, well ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ya, well ... (Score:4, Funny)
... I tried playing Jenga with my friend's Roomba and it did not go well.
At least it cleaned up after itself.
Now make it bigger and stronger (Score:3)
and set it loose in an auto scrapyard.
Nothing to see here, folks... (Score:2)
This is all very interesting, but it means nothing until the robot learns to play Aussie Rules Jenga. And for that, it needs to learn how to drink like an alcoholic camel.
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Excellent point. The thought of a robot with a hangover is...disquieting.
Try this (Score:2)
I have a friend, Jason, who is a dancer/coreographer, who built a jenga set out of two by fours. He and his troup would play at renaissance faires using only their feet. Let me know when a robot can do that.
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Very Important:More significant than winning at Go (Score:2)
This is a big deal, if it works reasonably well. Interacting with the real world is much more difficult than interacting with a mathematical abstraction.
This would require very sensitive movement, plus quite a bit of analysis. It may well beat most human players with better forward planning, but that is just minimax.
We will start to see a *lot* of robots over the next few years.
It will never beat this creature at Jenga. (Score:1)
No way will it ever beat this biologically based Jenga master. [youtube.com]
(I know youtube links are a risky click here. This one's apropos, I promise).