In the Future, Warehouse Robots Will Learn on Their Own<br />Mr. Mahler and the rest of the Berkeley team trained the machine by showing it hundreds of purely digital objects, and after<br />that training, it could pick up items that weren’t represented in its digital data set.<br />“It figures out the best way to grab each object, right from the middle of the clutter,” said Jeff Mahler,<br />one of the researchers developing the robot inside a lab at the University of California, Berkeley.<br />What’s more, when the team built simulated piles of random objects<br />and fed those into the neural network, it could learn to lift items from physical piles, too.<br />Researchers at places like Northeastern University, Carnegie Mellon University, Google and OpenAI — the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk — are developing similar techniques, and many believe<br />that such machine learning will ultimately allow robots to master a much wider array of tasks, including manufacturing.<br />And when the team plugged this neural network into the two-armed robot, it could do the same with physical objects.<br />Like Siemens and the Toyota Research Institute, Amazon is helping to fund the work at Berkeley, and it has an acute need for this kind of robot.
