Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand

Key Takeaways

we tried to build robots that learn a little bit like humans do by trial and error what we've done is trained an algorithm to solve the Rubik's Cube one-handed with a robotic captain which is actually pretty hard even for a human to do we don't tell it how the hand is to move the the cube in order to get there the particular friction that's on the fingers how easy it is to turn the faces on the cube what the gravity what the weight of the cube is all of these things it needs to learn by itself the interesting thing is that kind of standard techniques in robotics haven't been able to scale to that complexity that we see in a robotic hand humans have evolved to be able to manipulate and operate our hands so there's a huge amount of learning that's happened through evolution to get us to this point as a as a species and the robot has to learn all of this from scratch instead of trying to write very dedicated algorithms to operate such a hand we took a different approach where we create thousands of different simulated environments and learn to do the task in all of those and hopefully the robotic hand will be able to do it in the real world as well this means like thousands of years of experience that is your network has had in simulation every time the argument good at the task we make the task harder that's really crucial because you need exposure to really complicate environments in order to eventually be robust to the real world you put a rubber glove on their hand and can still carry out the task this ability to generalize to new environments feels like a very poor piece of intelligence it really changes the way we think about training of general purpose robots moving from thinking too much about the actual arguments and start thinking about how do we create complex enough worlds where they can learn at some point then it would be more down to the imagination what robots could actually accomplish they hope is to build robots that can do many different tasks to increase the standard of living and give everybody a better life [Music]