{"id":294635,"date":"2018-09-10T03:44:49","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T07:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/uncategorized\/mits-new-robot-can-visually-understand-objects-its-never-seen-before.php"},"modified":"2018-09-10T03:44:49","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T07:44:49","slug":"mits-new-robot-can-visually-understand-objects-its-never-seen-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/futurism\/mits-new-robot-can-visually-understand-objects-its-never-seen-before.php","title":{"rendered":"MIT\u2019s New Robot Can Visually Understand Objects It\u2019s Never Seen Before"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p><div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"158\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-assets.futurism.com\/2018\/09\/robot-machine-300x158.png\" class=\"attachment-medium size-medium wp-post-image\" alt=\"\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/div><h2><strong>A FIRST LOOK.<\/strong><\/h2><p>Computer vision &mdash;&nbsp;a machine&rsquo;s ability to &ldquo;see&rdquo; objects or images and understand something about&nbsp;them &mdash; can already help you unlock your fancy new iPhone just by looking at it. The thing is, it has to have seen that information before to know what it&rsquo;s looking at.<\/p><p>Now,&nbsp;researchers from MIT&rsquo;s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a computer vision system that can identify objects it has <em>never<\/em> seen before. Not to mention it&rsquo;s an important step towards getting robots to move and think the way humans do.<\/p><p>They published their research on Monday and plan to&nbsp;present it at the Conference on Robot Learning in Z&uuml;rich, Switzerland, in October.<\/p><h2><strong>A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE.<\/strong><\/h2><p>The MIT team calls its system &ldquo;Dense Object Nets&rdquo; (DON). DON can &ldquo;see&rdquo; because it looks at objects as a collection of points that the robot processes to form a three-dimensional &ldquo;visual roadmap.&rdquo; That means scientists don&rsquo;t have to sit there and tediously label the massive datasets that most computer vision systems require.<\/p><h2><strong>FAMILIAR BUT NOT IDENTICAL.<\/strong><\/h2><p>When DON sees an object that looks like one it&rsquo;s already familiar with, it can identify the various parts of that new object. For example, after researchers showed DON a shoe and taught it to pick the shoe up by its tongue, the system could then pick other shoes up by their tongues, even if it hadn&rsquo;t seen the shoes previously or they were in different positions than the original.<\/p><p>&ldquo;Many approaches to manipulation can&rsquo;t identify specific parts of an object across the many orientations that object may encounter,&rdquo; researcher Lucas Manuelli said in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/emb_releases\/2018-09\/miot-rcp090418.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a press release<\/a>. &ldquo;For example, existing algorithms would be unable to grasp a mug by its handle, especially if the mug could be in multiple orientations, like upright, or on its side.&rdquo;<\/p><h2><strong>TOMORROW&rsquo;S ROBOTS.<\/strong><\/h2><p>This advanced form of computer vision could do a lot that robots can&rsquo;t do now.&nbsp;We could someday get a robot equipped with the system to sort items in a recycling center as they move down a conveyor belt without needing to train it on huge datasets. Or maybe we could even show one of these&nbsp;&ldquo;self-supervised&rdquo; robots an image of a tidy desk and have it organize our own.<\/p><p>Ultimately, this is another step forward on the path to <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/third-wave-ai-darpa\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">machines<\/a> that are as capable as humans. After that, we&rsquo;ll just have to see how much <em>more capable<\/em> than us they can get.<\/p><p><strong>READ MORE<\/strong>:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/emb_releases\/2018-09\/miot-rcp090418.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robot Can Pick up Any Object After Inspecting It<\/a> [EurekAlert]<\/p><p><em><strong>More on smarter bots:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/third-wave-ai-darpa\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It&rsquo;s &ldquo;Thinking&rdquo;<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p><p>The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/computer-vision-mit-robot\/\">MIT&rsquo;s New Robot Can Visually Understand Objects It&rsquo;s Never Seen Before<\/a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p><p>Read this article:<br><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/computer-vision-mit-robot\/\" title=\"MIT&rsquo;s New Robot Can Visually Understand Objects It&rsquo;s Never Seen Before\">MIT&rsquo;s New Robot Can Visually Understand Objects It&rsquo;s Never Seen Before<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> A FIRST LOOK.  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/futurism\/mits-new-robot-can-visually-understand-objects-its-never-seen-before.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}