One Step Closer to Human Intelligence - MIT CSAIL Combine Sight And Touch in AI

In more industrial situations, an AI system that can recognize different materials and grasp things more effectively without having to repeatedly try to pick up an object could bring new capabilities to a wide range of different processes and sectors. Handling extremely hazardous materials such as nuclear waste, for example, could be made far safer if a human were not required to control a robotic arm and a system could use image inputs to learn how best to pick up a container or even raw radioactive waste with a significantly reduced chance of dropping and spilling toxic material. In construction, autonomous lifting arms or those attached to vehicles could calculate the weight of an object based on its material and 3D images of, say, a steel girder. When digging or drilling to lay foundations, prepare a site, or laying underwater pipelines, ultrasonic images could be fed into the system and paired with tactile probe data to determine exactly where to drill in real-time without damaging existing infrastructure or delicate ecosystems.