A robot can create a model of itself to plan how to move and reach a goal – something its developers say makes it self-aware, though others disagree.
Every robot is trained in some way to do a task, often in a simulation. By seeing what to do, robots can then mimic the task. But they do so unthinkingly, perhaps relying on sensors to try to reduce collision risks, rather than having any understanding of why they are performing the task or a true awareness of where they are within physical space. It means they will often make mistakes – bashing their arm into an obstacle, for instance – that humans wouldn’t because they would compensate for changes.
“It’s a very essential capability of humans that we normally take for granted,” says Chen at Duke University, North Carolina.
“I’ve been working for quite a while on trying to get machines to understand what they are, not by being programmed to assemble a car or vacuum, but to think about themselves,” says co-author Hod at Columbia University, New York.
The cameras fed video images back to a deep neural network, a form of AI, connected to the robot that monitored its movement within the space.
For 3 hours, the robot wriggled randomly the neural network was fed information about the arm’s mechanical movement and watched how it responded by seeing where it moved to in the space. This generated 7888 data points – and the team generated an additional 10,000 data points through a simulation of the robot in a virtual version of its environment. To test how well the AI had learned to predict the robot arm’s location in space, it generated a cloud-like graphic to show where it “thought” the arm should be found as it moved.
If the neural network is considered to be part of the robot itself, this suggests the robot has the ability to work out where it physically is at any given moment.
“To me, this is the first time in the history of robotics that a robot has been able to create a mental model of itself,” says. “It’s a small step, but it’s a sign of things to come.”
In their research paper, the researchers describe their robot system as being “3D self-aware” when it comes to planning an action. Believes that a robot that is self-aware in a more general, human sense is 20 to 30 years away. Chen says that full self-awareness will take scientists a long time to achieve. “I wouldn’t say the robot is already [fully] self-aware,” he says.
Others are more cautious – and potentially – about the paper’s claims of even 3D self-awareness. “There is potential for further research to lead to useful applications based on this method, but not self-awareness,” says Andrew at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The computer simply matches shape and motion patterns that happen to be in the shape of a robot arm that moves.
However, he is uncertain on the information so far published by Chen and their colleagues if that self-perception would continue the neural network-equipped robot moved to completely new locations and had to constantly “learn” to adjust its motion to compensate for new obstacles. “A robot continually modelling itself, concurrent with motion, would be the next big step towards a robot with self-perception,” he says.
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