What Robots Can Learn from Babies

Children quickly learn to predict what will happen if they turn a cup filled with juice upside down. Robots, on the other hand, don't have a clue. Researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) in Seattle have developed a computer program that shows how machines determine how the objects captured by a camera will most likely behave. This could help make robots and other machines less prone to error, and might help self-driving cars navigate unfamiliar scenes more safely. The system, developed by Roozbeh Mottaghi and colleagues, draws conclusions about the physical properties of a scene using a combination of machine learning and 3-D modeling.