Bots Learn by Watching Human Behavior

Robots following coded instructions to complete a task? Old school. Robots learning to do things by watching how humans do it? That’s the future. Stanford’s Animesh Garg and Marynel Vázquez shared their research in a talk on “Generalizable Autonomy for Robotic Mobility and Manipulation” at the GPU Technology Conference last week. In lay terms, generalizable autonomy is the idea that a robot can observe human behavior, and learn to imitate it in a way that’s applicable to a variety of tasks and situations. What kinds of situations? Learning to cook by watching YouTube videos, for one. And figuring out how to cross a crowded room for another.