This robot can figure out how to open almost any door on its own

A wheeled robot set loose on a college campus has figured out how to open all kinds of doors and drawers while rolling around in the real world. The robot adapted to new challenges on its own – paving the way for machines capable of independently interacting with physical objects. "You want the robots to work autonomously… without relying on humans to keep giving examples at test time for every new kind of scenario that you're in," says Deepak Pathak at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pennsylvania. Pathak and his colleagues initially trained the robot through imitation learning, providing visual examples of how to open objects such as doors, cabinets, drawers and refrigerators. They then turned it loose on the CMU campus to try opening doors and cabinets it had never encountered before.