The hottest robot may be the main force of artific

Blue robots may be the main force of artificial intelligence in the future

Global robot sales have doubled in the past five years, but today's robots deployed in factories and warehouses are almost the same as our robots decades ago. They are powerful and precise, but they are expensive to buy and dangerous for humans

blue is a new robot at the University of California, Berkeley, which aims to break this pattern through artificial intelligence

blue looks a bit like a child's robot drawing: it is made of bulky 3D printing parts, and it has a pair of humanoid robot arms with pliers. It can use VR, which also allows operators to wave poly (aryl ether ketone) (Paek) is a kind of polymer arms formed by the connection of phenylene ring through ether bond and carbonyl group, and then use blue wave to control its tandem weapon. It can also train the use of artificial intelligence to manipulate objects, which is still very rare in robots

Pieter abbeel, a roboticist in charge of the project, hopes to change this. He said that blue has been built from scratch to take advantage of recent AI improvements. The fact that AI is becoming more and more powerful gives us a chance to rethink how to design robots, abbeel told the verge

compared with the above, the technicians of our company shared with you how to make the change experimental machine play the best working effect and the common sense of the safety protection of the experimental machine. Under the common sense, the future robot will be reactive and dynamic. They will be able to work safely with humans without destroying them, rather than planning their actions in advance, and they will use cameras and sensors to navigate the world in real time

if you look at traditional robots, their design revolves around the principle of very high precision and repetitive motion, Abel said. But you don't necessarily need submillimeter repeatability. (this is to be able to perform the same task again and again, and the movement difference is less than a millimeter.) Humans have no submillimeter repeatability. Instead, we use our eyes and touch to complete the work through feedback

abbel and his team, researcher Stephen McKinley and graduate student David gealy hope blue can operate in the same way. It has a central vision module with a depth sensing camera, and its arm is controlled by a motor with a rubber band, which makes it flexible. If you push the industrial robot arm, it's like pushing a brick wall. But blue is more like a person in a crowded subway car: push it, and it will move to one side

this makes blue work more safely, but it is also suitable for research using reinforcement learning, which is an AI training method that has become popular in robotics. The working principle of reinforcement learning is to require agents to complete a task and give rewards when the task is completed. This is basically trial and error. At first, the agent doesn't know how to achieve the goal, and then slowly self-study

using traditional robots with reinforcement learning may be expensive. Their lack of flexibility makes them brittle and easy to damage. In addition, reinforcement learning takes time to produce results, and because robots are expensive, the cost will soon increase

this is another area where blue may make a difference. PR2 is a popular research installation simple robot built by will garage. It also has a pair of arms and pliers. Researchers will recover the researchers' funds back to about $400000. In contrast, blue's bill of materials application, the company's technical expertise in the field of materials is only $3000. Abbeel said that the team has not yet determined the final price, but they hope to target within the range of $5000

when you are willing to give up sub millimeter accuracy, this is possible because you realize that you do not need AI based control, abbeel said

many other research laboratories and start-ups are also targeting this new model, hoping to teach robots how to use artificial intelligence. Abbeel is the president of one of them, a startup called embodied intelligence. Blood AI, the firm of building a robot number selection warehouse project, is another kind. Openai, a research laboratory founded by Elon Musk, has done similar work with robot hands, and Google is also exploring AI training for robots

however, some experts are skeptical about the appeal of blue. They noticed that it was no different from Baxter, another robot with arms and pliers, which meant working with humans. Last year, Baxter and rethink robotics went bankrupt

but abbeel is optimistic about the future of blue. The robot is currently being produced in small quantities, but abbeel hopes to expand its scale and eventually turn to outsourced manufacturing to produce larger numbers. The first target customers will be research laboratories and universities, where robots are currently shared among teams, just like computers in the 1960s. Providing cheaper robots will make them more widely available, thereby increasing the output of robot research

more importantly, abbeel hopes that blue can provide a blueprint for future home robots: low-cost, flexible and suitable for human use. This design is completely in line with our ideas, he said. There are still many challenges in the future, not like we think this particular robot is at home. [but] this is a design paradigm that leads us to a new direction