Ken Goldberg on Ambi Robotics on the Robot Report
BCNM faculty Ken Goldberg recently appeared on The Robot Report Podcast alongside colleague Jim Liefer of Ambi Robotics to speak on their work with picking robots and operating systems based on simulation-to-reality artifical intelligence.
From the episode:
We have been looking at the idea of how do we grasp objects and in particular, objects of different shapes and sizes because it's fairly easy to grasp a cube or cylinder but once you get into more complicated shapes, the problem is very difficult. In fact, it's challenging because humans are very good at this even at a young age, but robots are still klutzes. And so we've been working on tackling this from a variety of perspectives.
One of the big breakthroughs came when Jeff Moller, the cofounder of Ambi, joined my lab, and we started working together to apply deep learning to the problem. We combined ideas from analytic models that go back over a hundred years to be able to understand the physics and the mechanics of grasping with deep learning to be able to address the perception aspect of it. We also combined it with 3D depth sensors and then trained a very big neural network on lots of examples in simulations.
Listen to the whole podcast episode here!