Robot Revolution? Scientists Teach Robots to Learn
Would a robot serving you coffee in bed make waking up easier on weekend mornings? Could a household robot help an elderly relative who is living alone? How would you like to climb into a robotic car and eat breakfast with kids while you’re all driven to school and work?
These scenarios （情况） may sound like science fiction, but experts say they‘re a lot closer to becoming reality than you probably think.
Brown University roboticist Chad Jenkins expects a near-term robot revolution that will echo the computing revolution of recent decades. And he says it will be driven by enabling robots to learn more like humans do—by watching others demonstrate behaviors and asking questions.
“The robots you’re seeing now mostly are analogous （相似的） to the mainframe computer of the 1970s,” Jenkins said. “But you’re starting to see things develop. The vacuum cleaners （真空吸尘器）, the drones （无人机）, those are the initial steps,” he said, referring to iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner, which has autonomously cleaned millions of homes since its 2002 debut （初次露面）. “And these platforms are going to get cheaper while becoming more capable and more compact,” he added.
And entrepreneurs like Dmitry Grishin, founder of a major Russian investment firm dedicated to personal robotics, have taken notice. He says the industry could be worth $18 billion by 2015.
And to really transform, roboticists say, robots will have to evolve from machines that can perform only the tasks that they’re programmed to do into automatons that can truly learn. That’s because it’s impossible to pre-program a robot for everything it will encounter in the ever-changing real world.
“If you look at where robots are successful right now, it’s primarily in applications where the environment is very controlled, like an assembly line where everything is the same, or in the hands of experts with PhDs, where we see them on Mars,” said Chernova.
“To really get them to handle the complexities of our real world,” she said, “they are going to have to be customized on site. It‘s not going to happen tomorrow, but it’s very close.”
Such a leap could help bring robots into the mainstream.