Robots performing tasks according to a predetermined set of instructions are nothing new. But robots capable of learning how to do something by watching videos are a completely different thing.
If you have posted a video of your favourite recipe on a popular website, chances are that it will be tried by a robot.
Yiannis Aloimonos, who leads a team that is trying to teach a robot how to reproduce simple tasks by watching videos, said, "There exists a huge amount of video information on the Internet that we can use."
So far, the robot named Julia can pour ingredients, add dressing and mix a simple salad. It learns by breaking each task into basic parts, such as grasping a spoon, bringing it to the bowl, stirring the salad and observing the results. As Julia can see, hear and remember things and then combine those parts to perform certain tasks, Aloimonos said the project can combine all those abilities.
But why teach a robot how to understand a video when it can easily follow a fixed programme? Aloimonos said, "You have a system that is done just for this particular task. And so, it can't generalize (推广). You cannot take it and put it into a different environment. It is not flexible. "
Aloimonos said one of the problems the researchers are trying to solve is how to make the robot understand and use what it learns during the performance of a certain task, the so-called feedback(反馈). Another problem will be the introduction of language.
"I believe it will take quite some time before the robots are able to understand metaphorical(比喻性的) language," he added. But we don't need that in order to create a new world in which the robots will be working for us.
