Former MIT professor Rodney Brooks studies and engineers robot intelligence, looking for the holy grail of robotics: the AGI, or artificial general intelligence. For decades, we've been building robots to do highly specific tasks -- welding, riveting, delivering interoffice mail -- but what we all want, really, is a robot that can figure things out on its own, the way we humans do.
Brooks realized that a top-down approach -- just building the biggest brain possible and teaching it everything we could think of -- would never work. What would work is a robot who learns like we do, by trial and error, and with many separate parts that learn separate jobs. The thesis of his work which was captured in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,went on to become the title of the great Errol Morris documentary.
A founder of iRobot, makers of the Roomba vacuum, Brooks is now founder and CTO of Rethink Robotics, whose mission is to apply advanced robotic intelligence to manufacturing and physical labor. Its first robots: the versatile two-armed Baxter and one-armed Sawyer. Brooks is the former director of CSAIL, MIT's Computers Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
As usual, the TED community is busy with new projects and news — here are a few highlights. Meet two newly minted MacArthur “geniuses.” Visual artist Titus Kaphar and violinist Vijay Gupta have been named 2018 MacArthur Fellows! The fellowship, established in 1981, awards $625,000 over the course of five years to individuals of exemplary creative merit, to […]
Continue readingCloud robotics, belief space, and more ideas from the robot future.
Continue readingIn Marco Tempest’s latest TED Talk, he introduces EDI the robot, which dances, makes jokes, does impressions of Woody Allen and even performs magic tricks. Designed to aid in factory production, EDI also has a screen programmed with facial expressions, begging the question: Why do we build robots with human-like faces and expressions?
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