Robot demonstrates human-like learning abilities

BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- Robots that can learn and get smarter all by themselves is not far off into the future as you may think.

Berkeley researchers created a robot named Brett that performs tedious tasks, such as getting a trapezoid into the right opening on a wooden box. Brett gets better at tasks after trying for a few minutes. "It does appear like it could be a human kind of learning, how to move its joints for the first time," Chelsea Finn said.

But the professor overseeing the research prefers to think of it like training a dog. "You can't literally tell a pet what to do, but you might reward it with food if it does something good," U.C. Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel said.

And that's what Brett's programmers are doing. They've offered him a numerical reward for getting the shape inside the box and the more graceful he is, the higher the score. "We've had it learn on its own, how to put caps onto bottles," Sergey Levine said.

In fact, the researchers have all sorts of video of Brett solving simple problems all by himself. "All you have to do is define what is good and the robot will learn how to achieve good performance," Abbeel said.

Brett is expensive and he's really meant to live in a research lab, but the sort of learning he's doing is key for the kinds of robots that might one day come home with you and help you out around the house.

Over the years, we've seen Brett's brothers and sisters fetch beers from the fridge, go out for a sandwich and even learn to play pool.

They're all PR2 robots built by Silicon Valley-based Willow Garage for this sort of research. "If we can have practical household robots, we can have them go into your home, they can clean up your house, they can do the dishes, do the laundry," Levine said.

And though Brett took hours learning to fold a towel a few years ago, he solved a puzzle in minutes.

The same sort of problem solving as loading a dishwasher for someone who just can't get around like they used to. "They might need somebody to stop by, might need care. If they had a helper robot, they might maintain that independence," Abbeel said.