Brilliant 10: The Robot Trainer
Crowdsourcing will help robots learn complex tasks the same way children do As an Atari-addicted kid, all Chad Jenkins wanted was to someday become a videogame designer. But once he got to grad school, he switched his obsession to robots. Jenkins, now at Brown University, aims to program robots so that they learn the way children do: through mimicry andrepetition. To teach his first virtual humanoid robot how to do the Cabbage Patch, he programmed it to study his moves and replicate them. Now he's turned his attention to more-complex tasks, such as setting a table or preparing a meal. The key is repetition. The more a robot observes, and the greater the variety of approaches to a given task that it observes, the better it will be able to understand the underlying essence of the act itself. Such teaching takes a lot of repetition. rather than do all the dancing or...