Teaching Robots To Do Stuff

Berkeley-UW-Stanford team project allows allow robots to learn by real-world attempts by figuring out how to accomplish the task using any kind of minimally specced robot

What’s the biggest problem in robotics? If you want to train them, you need real-world data… and current methods which would require say a robot to attempt to plug a power cord in 10,000 times in order to learn how to do it, are just too expensive in the real world.

This Berkeley-UW-Stanford team decided to solve this by:

• putting together an out-of-the-box software stack for getting reinforcement learning running on robots

• putting together the best pieces for algorithms, rewards and resets; with

• minimal hardware specifications for controllers that work well for contact-based manipulation tasks