wikipedia for robots
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2/24/2016 Wikipedia for Robots
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600848/wikipediaforrobots/ 1/5
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Wikipedia for Robots
People have learned to pool their knowledge. We need to help machines do the same.
February 23, 2016
umans have gained a lot of value by organizing all their
knowledge and making it widely accessible—in textbooks,
libraries, Wikipedia, and YouTube, to name a few
examples. These pools of knowledge aren’t valuable just for grand
scientific ventures but also for the trivial stuû of everyday human
lives: you can easily find thousands of YouTube videos that will teach
you how to cook an omelet.
We now live in a world where
robots are helping humans in
their daily lives, and just like
humans, robots need to learn
new skills in order to do their
01 Wikipedia for Robots
Robot Breakthroughs
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2/24/2016 Wikipedia for Robots
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jobs successfully. And we
shouldn’t expect a robot to learn
on its own from scratch, any
more than we’d expect a human
to do so—imagine a child
growing up with no access to
textbooks, libraries, or the
Internet.
However, the organized
collections of knowledge that
work for humans aren’t so great
for robots. A robot wouldn’t get
much useful information if it
queried a search engine for how
to “bring sweet tea from the
kitchen.” Robots require
something diûerent—access to
finer details for planning, control,
and natural language
understanding. When asked to
bring sweet tea, the robot would
need access to the knowledge for interpreting the language symbols
(“tea”) in terms of physical entities (“a particular container having sweet
tea”), the spatial knowledge that sweet tea can be either on a table or in
a fridge, and the knowledge for inferring how to grasp and manipulate
objects. It’s possible to manually script a demo for one particular
situation, but handling this across diûerent tasks and in diûerent
environments is still an open problem.
2/24/2016 Wikipedia for Robots
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600848/wikipediaforrobots/ 3/5
Ashutosh Saxena
In 2014, I started a project called
RoboBrain at Cornell University
along with PhD students Ashesh Jain
and Ozan Sener. We now have
collaborators at Stanford and Brown.
What we’re working on is a way of
sharing information that allows
robots to gather whatever knowledge
they need for a task (see “Robots That
Teach Each Other”). If one robot
learns, then the knowledge is
propagated to all the robots.
RoboBrain achieves this by gathering
the knowledge from a variety of sources. The system stores multiple
kinds of information, including symbols, natural language, visual or
shape features, haptic properties, and motions.
This approach represents a huge shift in thinking. Historically, research
groups working with robots have trained their robots in isolation. Yes,
we often share ideas through publications and software that can be used
by another research group, but what one robot might learn hasn’t been
accessible to another researcher’s robot. To add to the problem, research
groups have been working on diûerent problems—one might have
focused on the computer vision problem of identifying a cup, while
another worked on the language problem of what is a “cup,” while a
third tackled how to grasp a cup.
That’s the kind of approach we need to get past. A cup is one object, not
three. And a robot, just like a person, needs to be able to have all the
knowledge it needs in one place.
2/24/2016 Wikipedia for Robots
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600848/wikipediaforrobots/ 4/5
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Credit Illustration by Andy Friedman
Ashutosh Saxena is the director of the RoboBrain project and the founder
and CEO of the startup Brain of Things.
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2/24/2016 Wikipedia for Robots
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600848/wikipediaforrobots/ 5/5
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