Nvidia is training robots to learn from watching humans

Nvidia has developed a method to train robots to carry out actions by first observing human activity. In initial applications, robots learned to pick up and move colored boxes and a toy car in a lab environment, using a Baxter robot. Learnings from such research will be used to retrain robots and create robots that can work safely alongside people in industrial settings and homes. "In the manufacturing environment, robots are really good at repeatedly executing the same trajectory over and over again, but they don't adapt to changes in the environment, and they don't learn their tasks," Nvidia principal research scientist Stan Birchfield told VentureBeat in an interview. "So to repurpose a robot to execute a new task, you have to bring in an expert to reprogram the robot at a fairly low level, and it's an expensive operation. What we're interested in doing is making it easier for a non-expert user to teach a robot a new task by simply showing it what to do."