Monday, June 23, 2014

A Step to Rosy the Robot's Robopocalypse: Programming Through Speaking



Robots are getting smarter, but they still need step-by-step instructions for tasks they haven't performed before. Before you can tell your household robot "Make me a bowl of ramen noodles," you'll have to teach it how to do that. Since we're not all computer programmers, we'd prefer to give those instructions in English, just as we'd lay out a task for a child.

But human language can be ambiguous, and some instructors forget to mention important details. Suppose you told your household robot how to prepare ramen noodles, but forgot to mention heating the water or tell it where the stove is.

In his Robot Learning Lab, Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, is teaching robots to understand instructions in natural language from various speakers, account for missing information, and adapt to the environment at hand.

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