Google DeepMind unveils AI robot that can teach itself without supervision
Google's DeepMind has developed a self-improving robotic agent, RoboCat, that can learn new tasks without human oversight. This technological advancement represents substantial progress towards creating versatile robots for everyday tasks.
Introducing RoboCat: DeepMind's newly developed robot, named RoboCat, is a groundbreaking step in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. This robot is capable of teaching itself new tasks without human supervision.
RoboCat is termed as a "self-improving robotic agent."
It can learn and solve various problems using different real-world robots like robotic arms.
How RoboCat Works: RoboCat learns by using data from its actions, which subsequently improves its techniques. This advancement can then be transferred to other robotic systems.
DeepMind claims RoboCat is the first of its kind in the world.
The London-based company, acquired by Google in 2014, says this innovation marks significant progress towards building versatile robots.
Learning Process of RoboCat: RoboCat learns much faster than other state-of-the-art models, picking up new tasks with as few as 100 demonstrations because it uses a large and diverse dataset.
It can help accelerate robotics research, reducing the need for human-supervised training.
The capability to learn so quickly is a crucial step towards creating a general-purpose robot.
Inspiration and Training: RoboCat's design was inspired by another of DeepMind’s AI models, Gato. It was trained using demonstrations of a human-controlled robot arm performing various tasks.
Researchers showed RoboCat how to complete tasks, such as fitting shapes through holes and picking up pieces of fruit.
After these demonstrations, RoboCat trained itself, improving its performance after an average of 10,000 unsupervised repetitions.
Capability and Potential of RoboCat: During DeepMind's experiments, RoboCat taught itself to perform 253 tasks across four different types of robots. It could adapt its self-improvement training to transition from a two-fingered to a three-fingered robot arm.
RoboCat is part of a virtuous training cycle, getting better at learning additional new tasks the more it learns.
Future development could see the AI learn previously unseen tasks.
This self-teaching robotic system is part of a growing trend that could lead to domestic robots.
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