Inside Google’s Rebooted Robotics Program

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

The new effort is called Robotics at Google. It includes many of the engineers and researchers who worked under Mr. Rubin, and it is led by Vincent Vanhoucke, a principal scientist at Google. Mr. Vanhoucke, a French-born researcher, was a key figure in the development of Google Brain, the company’s central artificial intelligence lab. His team recently moved into a new lab on Google’s main campus in Mountain View.
The New York Times was recently provided a first look at some of the technology the company has been working on.
While the machines may not be as eye-catching as humanoid robots, Google researchers believe that the subtly more advanced technology inside them gives them more potential in the real world. The company is developing ways for these robots to learn skills on their own, like sorting through a bin of unfamiliar objects or navigating a warehouse filled with unexpected obstacles.
Google’s new lab is indicative of a broader effort to bring so-called machine learning to robotics. Researchers are exploring similar techniques at places like the University of California, Berkeley, and OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by the Silicon Valley kingpins Elon Musk and Sam Altman. In recent months, both places have spawned start-ups trying to commercialize their work.

On a recent afternoon inside Google’s new lab, a robotic arm hovered over a bin filled with Ping-Pong balls, wooden blocks, plastic bananas and other random objects. Reaching into this pile of clutter, the arm grabbed a banana between two fingers and, with a gentle flick of the wrist, tossed it into a smaller bin several feet away. For a robot, it was a remarkable trick. When first presented with that pile of clutter, the arm did not know how to pick up a single object. But equipped with a camera that looked down into the bin, the Google system analyzed its own progress during about 14 hours of trial and error.
The arm eventually learned to toss items into the right bins about 85 percent of the time. When the researchers tried the same task, their accuracy rate was about 80 percent

[video src="https://int.nyt.com/data/videotape/finished/2019/03/1553523718/toss-720h.mp4" /]

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