All these talks about the robot running the world, or worst, controlling us, could it be just mankind’s own doing? Perhaps. Why? If you know what this robot is capable of, I am sure you will be asking the same question as we do. Robots are no longer dumb. They does more than putting things together based on lines of codes, or wander around your home sucking up dirt. They are thinking machines that could even learn to perform tasks by watching YouTube videos. The latter is just what this particular robot, developed by University of Maryland’s research team and funded by DARPA’s Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation and Execution program, can do: learn, remember and regurgitate the tasks the that it had watched. It sure sounds like a nightmare in the making if you were to look at it in a different perspective.
Learning robots are surely not the newest news, but one that learns using visual sense is a leap forward for even more intelligent machines, which on the bright side, could save roboticist valuable time by letting the robots watch videos to pick up new skill sets instead of feeding them with programs. In the case of this DARPA-funded program, the robot was shown a series of “how to” cooking videos on YouTube and based on those videos, it was able to perform the same tasks, right down to using the correct utensils without any human intervention. Not only does it learn. It will also store those information and builds a knowledge base that it would use to fine tune its new found skills and even share this knowledge with other machines.
At this point, we are going to gasp and exclaim ‘yikes’. Pardon us for the unnecessary freaking out, but all I imagine was a Terminator like future where robots think, learn, decide and well, even make, which can be pretty scary. Well, not that we will live to see this kind of thing happening, but still, it is a potential prospect if robots get a little too intelligent for our comfort. However, to DARPA, robot mutiny is definitely not part of the consideration – all it is concerned is efficiency, or is it really? You can learn more about this exciting (or not) development over at University of Maryland’s official document. Be warn, you will be assaulted by tons of robotic geek talks.
via Engadget
