The Toyota Research Institute is working on bringing robots into households to help people with everyday tasks. The company is using virtual reality to train these robots: robot trainers use VR goggles and controllers to control robots and give commands.
The robots, which look like an early version of Wall-E, can move around a house and learn new household tasks from a human teacher. Senior manager at TRI, Jeremy Ma, explains that the focus is on teaching the robots many tasks in the environment, rather than programming them with selected, specific tasks. "We teach the 'robot parameters' that are part of a set of behaviours - and that are necessary for a changing environment." Because every environment has different objects and requirements.
Linking the robot with the environment via VR
To achieve this, Toyota is using VR to simplify the process. Through VR, users can control the robot so that they can easily perform actions as a robot, teaching it new activities and tasks. "The teacher can see a model of the robot as well as the live data of the robot itself," said Ma. "This information is used to teach behaviours related to things in the environment."
Fleet learning - one robot learns, the others copy it
The VR application has an interface with buttons that prompt the robot to perform actions such as grasping, placing, pushing and pulling. When one of the robots learns a new activity, it can pass this information on to a shared system used by the other robots. This is what Toyota calls "fleet learning". Importantly, TIR senior manager Dan Helmick emphasised that all of this is currently based on research only and is nowhere close to being implemented at consumer level. "Our robots are research prototypes, not product concepts." Too bad, because I would love to have such a great assistant at home soon!
Source: uploadvr / Youtube
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