A way to let robots learn by listening will make them more useful

Researchers at the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab at Stanford University set out to change that. They first built a system for collecting audio data, consisting of a GoPro camera and a gripper with a microphone designed to filter out background noise. Human demonstrators used the gripper for a variety of household tasks and then used this data to teach robotic arms how to execute the task on their own. The team's new training algorithms help robots gather clues from audio signals to perform more effectively. "Thus far, robots have been training on videos that are muted," says Zeyi Liu, a PhD student at Stanford and lead author of the study.