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from the I-remember-a-robot-arm-from-a-movie-called-terminator dept.
A Step Closer to Self-Aware Machines
Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot does not know if it is a spider, a snake, an arm—it has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of "babbling," and within about a day of intensive computing, their robot creates a self-simulation. The robot can then use that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. The work [DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aau9354] is published today in Science Robotics.
[...] For the study, Lipson and his PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski used a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm. Initially, the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories, each comprising one hundred points. The robot then used deep learning, a modern machine learning technique, to create a self-model. The first self-models were quite inaccurate, and the robot did not know what it was, or how its joints were connected. But after less than 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within about four centimeters. The self-model performed a pick-and-place task in a closed loop system that enabled the robot to recalibrate its original position between each step along the trajectory based entirely on the internal self-model. With the closed loop control, the robot was able to grasp objects at specific locations on the ground and deposit them into a receptacle with 100 percent success.
[...] The self-modeling robot was also used for other tasks, such as writing text using a marker. To test whether the self-model could detect damage to itself, the researchers 3D-printed a deformed part to simulate damage and the robot was able to detect the change and re-train its self-model. The new self-model enabled the robot to resume its pick-and-place tasks with little loss of performance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:08PM
Well, for altruism (or, as a less ambitious goal, empathy) the robot needs not only to be able to model itself, but also to model other beings. In particular, to be emphatic for humans, it has to model humans, and it has to "robotomorphize" them (like we can empathize with animals by anthropomorphizing them).