Robots Learn by Watching How-to Videos

Reading time ( words)

When you hire new workers you might sit them down to watch an instructional video on how to do the job. What happens when you buy a new robot?

Cornell researchers are teaching robots to watch instructional videos and derive a series of step-by-step instructions to perform a task. You won’t even have to turn on the DVD player; the robot can look up what it needs on YouTube. The work is aimed at a future when we may have “personal robots” to perform everyday housework – cooking, washing dishes, doing the laundry, feeding the cat – as well as to assist the elderly and people with disabilities.

The researchers call their project ”RoboWatch.” Part of what makes it possible is that there is a common underlying structure to most how-to videos. And, there’s plenty of source material available. YouTube offers 180,000 videos on “How to make an omelet” and 281,000 on “How to tie a bowtie.” By scanning multiple videos on the same task, a computer can find what they all have in common and reduce that to simple step-by-step instructions in natural language.

Why do people post all these videos? “Maybe to help people or maybe just to show off,” said graduate student Ozan Sener, lead author of a paper on the video parsing method presented Dec. 16 at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Santiago, Chile.  Sener collaborated with  colleagues at Stanford University, where he is currently a visiting researcher.

A key feature of their system, Sener pointed out, is that it is “unsupervised.” In most previous work, robot learning is accomplished by having a human explain what the robot is observing – for example, teaching a robot to recognize objects by showing it pictures of the objects while a human labels them by name. Here, a robot with a job to do can look up the instructions and figure them out for itself.

05/13/2019 | Rice University

Mixing two brittle materials to make something flexible defies common sense, but Rice University scientists have done just that to make a novel dielectric. Dielectrics are the polarized insulators in batteries and other devices that separate positive and negative electrodes. Without them, there are no electronic devices.

01/18/2019 | ARL

The emergence of next generation virtual and augmented reality devices like the Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens has increased interest in using mixed reality to simulate training, enhance command and control, and improve the effectiveness of warfighters on the battlefield.

02/06/2018 | NASA

The technologies ranged from proposed new space suits to cryogenic propellant research, with implications for future NASA space missions as well as other research efforts.