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Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

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Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#41

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There are plenty of organisms on the planet that co-exist with more powerful ones and they don't attempt to wipe out the other. There would need to be such fierce competition over natural [or unnatural] resources that only one of the two organisms could exist, and then competition would give rise to a potential outcome of one extinguishing the other. Your question is simply an irrational fear, probably on the order o…

Plenty of biological organisms. That have niches in the biosphere. But this new life is/has neither. It could decide to cannibalize the earth to fuel a spacefaring civilization for instance. Not an irrational fear.

It's taking quite a license to assert the rationality of a worst-case prediction for something that is currently only possible in dreams.

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#43
post #8

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If that were to happen, I would suggest that an artificial "soul" could or would be created. Once you have that on your hands, things being to get interesting. Ethics, religion law, and so on will have one hell of a job on their hands. Especially when you consider that there would be immediate and obvious military applications.

Do animals have souls, and do we care?

We care if an animal is intelligent, because then it is sentient like us, and has rights.

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#44
post #32
post #14

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> true AI What does this even mean?

You can define general artificial intelligence in many ways. This is probably not comprehensive, but "an artificially constructed agent that is capable of solving a wide variety of tasks in a wide variety of different environments, doing this to successfully achieve some stated goal" should cover it. Add a clause for mostly being at least as capable of doing this as an average human, if you want to be sure. At the mo…

I dunno, there are plenty of humans that wouldn't make it to AI classification by that measurement, so I'm a skeptical to say the least. I don't think any of us are going to see past the uncanny valley of human-computer interaction—computers will have their tasks, but they'll be just that—task solvers. Why make it more magical than that? It's a waste of money to try, too—much of what makes humans unique isn't really useful in a business context (like giving up on problems because you're bored or hungry or having desires).

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#45
post #21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gazebo with Mike Sherman's physics engine might be good enough. DARPA paid to get a decent physics engine into Gazebo; the ones from games were never quite right.

Which physics engine is that? ODE?

Stanford (Simbody) is the new one.

The game engines don't do complex friction, as between gripper and target or foot and ground, very well.

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of organisms on the planet that co-exist with more powerful ones and they don't attempt to wipe out the other. There would need to be such fierce competition over natural [or unnatural] resources that only one of the two organisms could exist, and then competition would give rise to a potential outcome of one extinguishing the other. Your question is simply an irrational fear, probably on the order o…

Plenty of biological organisms. That have niches in the biosphere. But this new life is/has neither. It could decide to cannibalize the earth to fuel a spacefaring civilization for instance. Not an irrational fear.

Non-organic organisms would still require the biosphere to self-propagate on earth. Currently they need organic and inorganic matter to operate. Assuming they stayed purely mechanical constructs, they would need the byproducts of the earth to maintain themselves, and there are limits to those byproducts and the rate at which they can be produced, not to mention the rest of the biosphere that supports their production.

If they somehow evolved past mechanical constructs towards more chemical/biological machines, or some sort of electro-mechanical construct that wasn't constrained by a physical/machine form, they would, as far as i'm aware, still require the biosphere to propagate or at the very least interact with us.

Even if they did want to fuel a spacefaring civilization (why???), why would they cannibalize the earth when they can already travel to planets, moons, asteroids, etc which have more of the components they actually need to function? Unlimited access to solar power, more heavy metals, and aren't restricted to the limitations and detriments of our biosphere (oxidation, gravity, ionosphere, electrically conductive material falling on you all the time, etc). On top of all that, there'd be these damn adaptable irrational homicidal monkeys that fear anything that could threaten them, and many things that don't. It would behoove them to get the hell away from Earth as fast as possible.

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Anyway, all this assumes that somehow they could adapt faster than humans. I know of no plausible timeframe that anyone can yet estimate when this would happen. Kurzweil says 2045, but this makes no sense when you look at our actual progress over the past 50 years.

We still travel on Boeing 747s fueled by million-year-old decomposed plant juice. The richest nation in the world has one of the least advanced train systems in the world that only covers a fraction of the country. And one of the leading causes of death are the heavy speeding metal boxes we manually pilot through free space that are insanely less efficient than any other modern mode of transportation, purely because we like cars the most.

Predictions of technological advancement over 15 years in the future don't work because human progress is not based on capability. Much like your fear of a fate you can't be sure could even happen, our future is not based on what could happen, but what we make happen - our will.

Just as it is "possible" for us to birth a matricidal organism, it's just as possible for us to willingly never create such an organism. And since we imagine this supposed event would end in our own destruction, and we are [in general] on the side of self-preservation, it's not likely we would willingly pursue this event. It would be more likely if the idea never occurred to us.

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Great civilizations have existed several times with advanced science, then fell, and took several millennia just for others to get back to where they had been. In terms of what is actually a threat to ours today, climate change and an unstable political/socioeconomic climate actually will kill us in a few decades if left unchecked. I suggest we focus on the immediate threats before we sweat the theoretical and philosophical ones.

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok here goes. 1. The best / most recent attempt at this was for the DARPA robotics challenge and the Gazebo simulator. This was still very buggy and prone to hilarious / depressing physics. 2. Almost all game physics engines start from rigid body and slap on particles, deformables, etc. An exciting counter example to this is nVidia Flex which starts with unified particle simulation (much closer to molecular dynamics…

I agree with all the points you made but in addition I would add another - with external cameras for positioning and movement feedback, you don't need to have accurate geartrains or encoders nor have a rigid robot. Since the localization is all in software (and software is scalable/free from Google's standpoint) there are potentials for lots of weight and cost savings on the hardware side. Kind of like my robot: http…

I was hoping to use a robotic arm for a project I'm working on, and wondering if you guys could answer a question about motors. In my very limited research it looked like one of the factors that make the industrial (kuka, etc) robots so expensive was that they use backlash-free motors. What does that even mean?

I also saw a couple startups aimed at sub-$5k robots (like carbon.ai). Are they solving this problem in some novel way?

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#49
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do animals have souls, and do we care?

We care if an animal is intelligent, because then it is sentient like us, and has rights.

Why does it have rights? Why do we have rights? Which rights do we have?

Re: Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves

#50
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all the points you made but in addition I would add another - with external cameras for positioning and movement feedback, you don't need to have accurate geartrains or encoders nor have a rigid robot. Since the localization is all in software (and software is scalable/free from Google's standpoint) there are potentials for lots of weight and cost savings on the hardware side. Kind of like my robot: http…

I was hoping to use a robotic arm for a project I'm working on, and wondering if you guys could answer a question about motors. In my very limited research it looked like one of the factors that make the industrial (kuka, etc) robots so expensive was that they use backlash-free motors. What does that even mean? I also saw a couple startups aimed at sub-$5k robots (like carbon.ai). Are they solving this problem in som…

Backlash free motors are motors where the output shaft begins moving as soon as the motor starts moving. In particular, when the motor reverses direction there is no "slack" to pick up before the output shaft starts to move. The slack is called backlash when talking about gears and motors and what have you.

It's important for robots to not have backlash, because as movements are repeated, each bit of backlash adds up into a potentially big cumulative error. It could end up with the robot operating outside of the intended design envelope, which might be a safety problem.

I don't know what the startups are doing.

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