<div>Researchers, including those of Indian-origin, have developed new algorithms that allow a robot to do laundry without any specific knowledge of what it has to wash.<br /><br />University of California, Berkeley researchers Siddharth Srivastava, Abhishek Gupta and their colleagues from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst developed a new approach that allows a robot to plan its activity to accomplish an assigned task.<br /><br />To Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts, programming a robot to do the laundry represents a challenging planning problem because current sensing and manipulation technology is not good enough to identify precisely the number of clothing pieces that are in a pile and the number that are picked up with each grasp.<br /><br />People can easily cope with this type of uncertainty and come up with a simple plan. But roboticists for decades have struggled to design an autonomous system able to do what we do so casually - clean our clothes.<br /><br />"The widely imagined helper robots of the future are expected to 'clear the table,' 'do laundry' or perform day-to-day tasks with ease," Srivastava said.<br /><br />"Currently however, computing the required behaviour for such tasks is a challenging problem - particularly when there's uncertainty in resource or object quantities," he said.<br /><br />The team has designed new algorithms that allow autonomous systems to deal with uncertainty.<br /><br />The researchers used human behaviour - the almost unconscious action of pulling, stuffing, folding and piling - as a template, adapting both the repetitive and thoughtful aspects of human problem-solving to handle uncertainty in their computed solutions.<br /><br />By doing so, they enabled a robot to do the laundry without knowing how many and what type of clothes needed to be washed.<br /><br />Out of the 13 or so tasks involved in the laundry problem, the team's system was able to complete more than half of them autonomously and nearly completed the rest - by far the most effective demonstration of laundering AI to date.<br /><br />Though laundry robots are an impressive, and potentially time-saving, application of AI, the framework that Srivastava and his team developed can be applied to a range of problems.<br /><br />From manufacturing to space exploration to search-and-rescue operations, any situation where artificially intelligent systems must act, despite some degree of uncertainty, can be addressed with the method, researchers said.<br /></div>
<div>Researchers, including those of Indian-origin, have developed new algorithms that allow a robot to do laundry without any specific knowledge of what it has to wash.<br /><br />University of California, Berkeley researchers Siddharth Srivastava, Abhishek Gupta and their colleagues from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst developed a new approach that allows a robot to plan its activity to accomplish an assigned task.<br /><br />To Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts, programming a robot to do the laundry represents a challenging planning problem because current sensing and manipulation technology is not good enough to identify precisely the number of clothing pieces that are in a pile and the number that are picked up with each grasp.<br /><br />People can easily cope with this type of uncertainty and come up with a simple plan. But roboticists for decades have struggled to design an autonomous system able to do what we do so casually - clean our clothes.<br /><br />"The widely imagined helper robots of the future are expected to 'clear the table,' 'do laundry' or perform day-to-day tasks with ease," Srivastava said.<br /><br />"Currently however, computing the required behaviour for such tasks is a challenging problem - particularly when there's uncertainty in resource or object quantities," he said.<br /><br />The team has designed new algorithms that allow autonomous systems to deal with uncertainty.<br /><br />The researchers used human behaviour - the almost unconscious action of pulling, stuffing, folding and piling - as a template, adapting both the repetitive and thoughtful aspects of human problem-solving to handle uncertainty in their computed solutions.<br /><br />By doing so, they enabled a robot to do the laundry without knowing how many and what type of clothes needed to be washed.<br /><br />Out of the 13 or so tasks involved in the laundry problem, the team's system was able to complete more than half of them autonomously and nearly completed the rest - by far the most effective demonstration of laundering AI to date.<br /><br />Though laundry robots are an impressive, and potentially time-saving, application of AI, the framework that Srivastava and his team developed can be applied to a range of problems.<br /><br />From manufacturing to space exploration to search-and-rescue operations, any situation where artificially intelligent systems must act, despite some degree of uncertainty, can be addressed with the method, researchers said.<br /></div>