Making household robot helpers smarter

May 27, 2011
Robot Helper

A robot decides that a can needs to be picked up and then plans and executes the actual motions necessary to lift it from a table (credit: Melanie Gonick)

Computer scientists at MIT have improved the ability of robots to plan and perform complex actions around the house (and elsewhere).

The scientists tackled the problem with a hierarchical, progressive algorithm that can greatly reduce the computational cost associated with performing complex actions.

They said the key is to break the computationally burdensome larger goal of task and motion planning into smaller steps, and then make a detailed plan for only the first few, leaving the exact mechanisms of subsequent steps for later.

Their method differs from a traditional start-to-finish approach in that it has the potential to introduce suboptimalities in behavior. For example, a robot may pick up object A to move it to a location L, only to arrive at L and realize another object, B, is already there.

The robot will then have to drop A and move B before re-grasping A and placing it in L. Perhaps, if the robot had been able to “think ahead” far enough to check L for obstacles before picking up A, a few extra movements could have been avoided, the scientists said.

The researchers said that sacrificing some degree of behavior optimality is worth it to be able to break an extremely complex problem into doable steps.