alt Hacker NewsIs the issue also a lack of available sensor data?
Our own nerves produce a huge amount of data. Our eyes and balance also contribute to a very rich picture to enable movement and kinematics. This is all fused into usable feedback.
Arms on fixed axis with disconnected vision feel like we are still very far away from true robot training.
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Human "sense of balance"? Human vestibular system is a sad joke if you compare it against any off the shelf smartphone IMU. Proprioreception is a joke when you compare it against current sensing in every motor and absolute encoders in every joint. Human hearing loses to a half-decent microphone array.
Even human vision, the one perception channel evolution has put an awful lot of weight on, is beat pretty resoundingly by the kinds of camera units that ship in smartphones nowadays.
The two senses robots don't have an edge in are: touch and smell. But I'd struggle to make the case that smell is critical at all, and touch? Hard to beat it directly. In practice, however, it's already partially compensated for.
Sure, a robot with a basic UMI-style gripper doesn't get rich tactile feedback - only a few channels of feedback from arm joints and finger motors. But you know what those actuated UMI gripper get that humans don't? Wrist cams. A robot can see the object it's manipulating - right near the point where the manipulation happens. That matters a lot for precise manipulation tasks.
Humans don't have wrist cameras not because they're undesirable, but because evolution sucks at wiring. We don't suck at wiring.
The fact that humans can pull off general purpose manipulation tasks with the bodies they have, and the best of robots can't? A testament to how much of a gap is there between modern robotics AIs and the evolved wiring of human brains. The intelligence edge is what makes the human body, flawed as it is, work as well as it does. Everything in the human body is half-assed and then salvaged by the brain in post. But that gap is closing as AI tech advances.
Exactly. I suspect the problem isn't just the amount of training data, but how much of the relevant information is missing from it.
That is part of the problem. Yes, humans are absolutely studded with sensors, every hair you've got, every nerve ending. It's amazing that all that information gets processed as fast as it does even though the 'base clock' is rather low. There is a ton of pre-processing done on those signals though (for instance: the optical nerve is pretty much an extension of the brain, how is that for a high speed, high bandwidth interface). Then there are the reflexes, semi-autonomous parts of the nervous system that can react faster than the brain to deal with safety related concerns. For a very interesting biology angle have a look at octopi.