Google teaches robots to learn from each other

The robots of the world are uniting – and that's either a great thing or a terrifying thing depending on your view. Google has a plan to speed up robotic learning, and it involves getting robots to share their experiences – via the cloud – and collectively improve their capabilities – via deep learning. Sergey Levine from the Google Brain team, along with collaborators from Alphabet subsidiaries DeepMind and GoogleX, published a blog post on Monday describing an approach for "general-purpose skill learning across multiple robots." Teaching robots how to do even the most basic tasks in real world settings such as homes and offices has vexed roboticists for decades. To tackle this challenge, the Google researchers decided to combine two recent technology advances.