3 ms·
Two interesting things to notice from the video: 1. In the failure trials the robot does not move its arm toward the object as it falls. This is distinctly inh
by iandanforth 16y ago
Two interesting things to notice from the video:
1. In the failure trials the robot does not move its arm toward the object as it falls. This is distinctly inhuman! When we initiate a motor program we are constantly checking our prediction for the behavior of both our body and external objects against reality and then updating that program in real time. This bot apparently updates its program only after each trial.
2. The robot moves back to its standard starting position after each successful trial. This demonstrates the specificity of the motor pattern it's developed. Due to time pressure and the complexity of variations we deal with it is usually advantageous to learn a generalized pattern rather than a single pattern that works for a constrained set of starting conditions.
As a side note on the difficulty of this task, I agree with sukuriant that the paucity of the information the robot has, especially lack of fine grained touch, is a huge impediment. Secondly recall that in the human brain about 50% of the neurons live in the cerebellum which is strongly implicated in storing and updating fine grained motor patterns. (Gross patterns and intentions being initiated in the motor cortex).
- Retric 16y agoWatch a professional basketball payer shoot freethrows and you see an attempt to replicate initial conditions. It’s actually fairly normal when someone is trying to be precise, ex: Darts, billiards, tennis etc.