Meet RoboAgent: Enabling Robots to Acquire Manipulation Abilities

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. Learn more with this video.

“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. “Current robots are highly specialized and trained for individual tasks in isolation. In contrast, we set out to create a single artificial intelligence agent capable of exhibiting a wide range of skills in unseen scenarios. RoboAgent learns like human babies — leveraging a combination of abundant passive observations and limited active play.”