Future Home Assistants Are Robots that Learn on the Job

Stony Brook researchers reveal a novel method that enables robots to keep learning over their lifetimes

Imagine a robot assistant that not only helps around the house but gets smarter the longer it works with you. A group of researchers at Stony Brook and MIT has made a groundbreaking step toward turning this idea into reality.

By developing a method for robots to continually learn and improve as they assist people over time, this research promises to make home robots more useful, adaptable and intelligent. Their paper, titled ‘Embodied Lifelong Learning for Task and Motion Planning,’ appeared at the seventh Conference of Robotic Learning (CoRL). The study was led by Assistant Professor Jorge Mendez-Mendez, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The idea was to design a system that helps a robot learn both general skills (like grabbing anything) and specialized skills (like grabbing a fragile object) while deciding, in the moment, which one to use.

“Part of our solution was to make sure the robot was learning new tasks more effectively,” said Mendez-Mendez. “This is why instead of focusing solely on the final performance of a robot right after it was trained, we looked at how its capabilities were improving over time.”

Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.