Robot Learning with a Biologically-Inspired Brain (BECCA), The Sequel

Becca stands for brain emulating cognition and control architecture. It is a general purpose brain for robots. These are Coroware Corobots, mobile robots that each have one arm, one hand, two fingers, and one eye. They are named Remis and Romulus, and they each are using a copy of Becca as a brain. When Remis and Romulus do the right thing, they get rewarded. This is like when a dog behaves well and it gets a treat. At first, the robots don't know what they're supposed to do, so they try wiggling their arms and wandering around until they learn how to get rewards. Here, Reheis and Romulus are getting rewards for holding their arms with their elbows halfway bent. If their arms are all the way bent or straight, they get no reward. But they don't know what they will get rewarded for, so they try lots of different things. They drive forward and backward. They open and close their hands. They move their shoulders and spin their wrists. Eventually, they figure out what they are supposed to do and they get pretty good at it. They still try other things sometimes just to experiment, but mostly they sit still and keep their elbows halfway bent. This is a whole arm manipulator or WHAM for short. It lives at the University of New Mexico. It has seven different joints and can move about the same way as a human arm. The wham is also using Becca for a brain. Becca doesn't know anything about its body before it starts moving around. It learns like a baby by trying things and remembering what happens. Here, the wham is learning that same elbow task that Remis and Romulus learned. The difference is that a human is giving it rewards and punishments instead of a computer program. The human trainer could teach the whim to do lots of different tricks the same way they might teach a dog. Here's an example of a task that's just a little bit harder. Instead of just moving the elbow, the wham is moving three separate joints. And instead of three different positions, the wham can be in any one of 50 different positions. It takes a little longer, but the wham with its Becker brain can learn to do this task, too. These aren't very hard tricks for Remis and Romulus and the Wham to learn. As Becca gets better, they will get smarter. Eventually, they should get smart enough to be able to find things and even fetch them. For more videos, papers, or to download a copy of Becca, please visit www.sandia.gov. Gov/roar. [Music]