Engineers from Toyota, MIT and Columbia Engineering have once again demonstrated how impressive AI robot learning can be. A new video published by the Toyota Research Institute shows how an artificial intelligence robot can accomplish complex tasks in just a few hours that many people previously thought were impossible.
Learning that artificial intelligence is advancing faster than we expected may cause you to worry about humanity. But in this case, the robots are not learning how to destroy their human masters. Instead, they learn how to do more complex tasks like cutting vegetables, spreading tomato paste on a slice of bread, and even scrambling eggs.
While these may seem like relatively mundane tasks to us humans, teaching an AI robot to do them on its own is an exciting development. As humans, we can quickly learn how to carefully cut objects or even spread jam on toast. But robots do not have these instincts.
Instead, they need to be taught how to do these complex tasks over and over again until they can do them on their own. In this case, Toyota’s AI robot is able to complete many complex tasks after being shown how to do it by humans and then running simulations for several hours. Normally this type of progress can take days, weeks or even months.
While most of the robots we see these days are perfect for working in warehouses, unloading heavy crates, and similar tasks, if we want to move beyond these crude robots, we’ll need AI robots that can learn faster, and engineers at the Toyota Research Institute appear to have achieved that goal.
How we leverage this type of robotics could certainly present an interesting future. Other companies are working to train AI systems using virtual reality. But if Toyota can successfully pursue this system, other companies will undoubtedly follow suit, and so we may see a much broader breakthrough in how AI robots are trained in the near future.
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