Old Dog Training Methods Teach Robots New Tricks

Old Dog Training Methods Teach Robots New Tricks

With a training technique commonly used to teach dogs to sit and stay, researchers showed a robot how to teach itself several new tricks, including stacking blocks.


With the method, the robot, named Spot, was able to learn in days what typically takes a month.


By using positive reinforcement, an approach familiar to anyone who’s used treats to change a dog’s behavior, the team dramatically improved the robot’s skills and did it quickly enough to make training robots for real-world work a more feasible enterprise.


“The question here was how do we get the robot to learn a skill?” says lead author Andrew Hundt, a PhD student working in Johns Hopkins University’s Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory. “I’ve had dogs so I know rewards work and that was the inspiration for how I designed the learning algorithm.”


The research appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.


Teaching a Robot to Learn


Unlike humans and animals that are born with highly intuitive brains, computers are blank slates and must learn everything from scratch. But true learning is often accomplished with trial and error, and roboticists are still figuring out how robots can learn efficiently from their mistakes.


The team accomplished that by devising a reward system that works for a robot the way treats work for a dog. Where a dog might get a cookie for a job well done, the robot earned numeric points.


Hundt recalled how he once taught his terrier mix puppy named Leah the command “leave it,” so she could ignore squirrels on walks. He used two types of treats, ordinary trainer treats and something even better, like cheese.


Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.