If Toyota succeeds, perhaps one day soon its robot could clean your house so you won't have to!
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced that its new robot can understand and operate in complicated environments (like a house) that confuse most other robots, such as recognizing transparent and reflective surfaces.
MAx Bajracharya, vice president of robotics at TRI explains:
While a human can easily differentiate between an object and its reflection, transparent or reflective items commonly found in the home befuddle today’s robots. Since most robots are programmed to react to the objects and geometry in front of them without considering the context of the situation, they are easily fooled by a glass table, shiny toaster or transparent cup.
“To overcome this, TRI roboticists developed a novel training method to perceive the 3D geometry of the scene while also detecting objects and surfaces,” continued Bajracharya. “This combination enables researchers to use large amounts of synthetic data to train the system.” Using synthetic data also alleviates the need for time consuming, expensive, or impractical data collection and labeling.
Image: Toyota Research Institute
The video clip of the robot in action: