Switching from one smartphone to another is mostly a smooth procedure. You log into your accounts and your apps, preferences, and contacts should sync to the new hardware. But in the world of robotics, swapping an old robotic arm for a newer model has meant setting everything up from scratch.<\/p>\n
To fix that, a team of researchers at the Swiss \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne (EPFL) has developed what they call Kinematic Intelligence, a framework that makes switching robots work more like switching smartphones. They describe their system in a recent Science Robotics paper.<\/p>\n
Demonstrating skills<\/p>\n
For years, roboticists have been working on getting robots to learn from demonstration\u2014teaching them new skills by showing them what to do, rather than writing lines of code. The idea is to remotely control or physically guide the robot\u2019s arm to teach it a task like wiping a table, stacking boxes, or welding a car component. The problem is that most of these taught skills end up tied to the specific robot the training was done with.<\/p>\n
But robotics is advancing quickly. \u201cThe robots have different designs, and nowadays there are new designs being proposed\u2014that brings its own set of challenges,\u201d said Sthithpragya Gupta, a roboticist at EPFL and lead author of the study. If a new robot has slightly longer links, a different joint orientation, or a more complex configuration, that learned behavior instantly breaks and the new robot will likely flail, freeze, or crash if attempting it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith new designs come different capabilities and constraints,\u201d said Durgesh Haribhau Salunkhe, an EPFL roboticist and co-author of the study. \u201cThe problem is to adapt to these constraints and capabilities\u2014to faithfully replicate the actions demonstrated by a human.\u201d Today, making the leap from one robot body to another usually means starting from scratch and retraining the whole system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Switching from one smartphone to another is mostly a smooth procedure. You log into your accounts and your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-418627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}