Parenting a 3-Year-Old Robot

Humans are social creatures and learn from each other, even from a young age. Infants keenly observe their parents, siblings or caregivers. They watch, imitate and replay what they see to learn skills and behaviors. The way babies learn and explore their surroundings inspired researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Meta AI to develop a new way to teach robots how to simultaneously learn multiple skills and leverage them to tackle unseen, everyday tasks. The researchers set out to develop a robotic AI agent with manipulation abilities equivalent to a 3-year-old child. The team has announced RoboAgent, an artificial intelligence agent that leverages passive observations and active learning to enable a robot to acquire manipulation abilities on par with a toddler. "RoboAgent is a critical milestone toward general robotic agents that are efficient learners, effective in novel situations and capable of expanding their behaviors over time," said Vikash Kumar, adjunct faculty in the School of Computer Science 's Robotics Institute.