Developmental Humanoids: Humanoids that Develop Skills Automatically
Juyang Weng, Wey-Shiuan Hwang, Yilu Zhang, Changjiang Yang, Rebecca Smith · 2000
. It is desirable for humans to control humanoids through high-level commands, but it is too tedious for humans to issue commands for every detailed action for every fraction of a second. However, it is extremely challenging for humans to program a humanoid robot to such a sufficient degree that it acts properly in typical unknown human environments. This is especially true for humanoids due to the very large number of redundant degrees of freedom and a large number of sensors that are required for humanoids to work safely and effectively in the human environment. How can we address this fundamental problem? Motivated by human mental development from infancy to adulthood, we enable robots develop its mind automatically, through online, real time interactions with its environment. Humans mentally "raise" the robot through "robot sitting" and "robot schools" instead of task-specific robot programming. The SAIL developmental robot that has been built at MSU is an early prototype ...