Berkeley startup to train robots like puppets – RtoZ.Org – Latest Technology News

The Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have launched a start-up, Embodied Intelligence, Inc., to use the latest techniques of deep reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence to make industrial robots easily teachable. Robots today must be programmed by writing computer code, but imagine donning a VR headset and virtually guiding a robot through a task, like you would move the arms of a puppet, and then letting the robot take it from there. That's the vision of Pieter Abbeel, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and his students, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan and Tianhao Zhang, who have launched a startup, Embodied Intelligence Inc., to use the latest techniques of deep reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence to make industrial robots easily teachable. "Right now, if you want to set up a robot, you program that robot to do what you want it to do, which takes a lot of time and a lot of expertise," said Abbeel, who is currently on leave to turn his vision into reality. "With our advances in machine learning, we can write a piece of software once -- machine learning code that enables the robot to learn -- and then when the robot needs to be equipped with a new skill, we simply provide new data."