This new robotics challenge could bring us closer to human-level AI

This makes one appreciate the complexity of human vision and agency. The next time you go to a supermarket, consider how easily you can find your way through aisles, tell the difference between different products, reach for and pick up different items, place them in your basket or cart, and choose your path in an efficient way. And you're doing all this without access to segmentation and depth maps and by reading items from a crumpled handwritten note in your pocket. The TDW-Transport Challenge is in the process of accepting submissions. In the meantime, the authors of the paper have already tested the environment with several known reinforcement learning techniques. Their findings show that pure reinforcement learning is very poor at solving task and motion planning challenges.