Do you know how hard it is to house-train a robot? Apparently not very. At least, not anymore, thanks to San Diego startup Brain Corporation, and its Brain Operating System, created to help robots learn and develop, much in the same way you’d train a new puppy.
BrainOS runs on a single-board computing platform and reference designs (some of which were shown off at Qualcomm’s Uplinq developer conference this week), and the company hopes to make building a robotics product as easy as creating a mobile app. Indeed, with a full Linux computer on board, it’s quite a powerful platform. The team has made it possible to program right onto the board, which has both a USB and HDMI port on it, making the visualization of data and subsequent development really easy.
The company claims the reason robots aren’t yet a part of everyday life is because they are too difficult to program, and don’t easily adapt to changing environments, which makes them a little klutzy.
BrainOS hopes to address all your clumsy robot fears, with learning algorithms that allow bots to carry out specialized tasks and adapt to new environments through training.
“The idea is you train it much like you would an animal,” said company scientist Jean-Baptiste Passot, a Ph.D in Neuroscience, adding that the robot would soon come to associate an action with a state, “so, say, if you point that way then it actually goes that way.”
The robot, he said, could be trained to navigate cluttered family environments, avoid obstacles and use simple gestures to pick up household objects for cleaning, sorting, or moving.
They could also be capable of doing much hated tasks like taking out the garbage, weeding, or cleaning up pet poop. On a more industrial level, single-task agricultural robots could be employed to carry out crop harvesting, precision spraying, or hoeing.
Of course, if you’ve ever seen Space Odyssey, you know that a robot can just as well be a system, say for home automation, or that all-encompassing buzz phrase “the Internet of Things,” where sensors and actuators are embedded all around the house in order to make it “smart.” Of course, at the moment, YOU need to be pretty smart in order to know how to program such a complicated system yourself, which is where BrainOS comes in again, as a way to replace that pesky programming with training.
Installed on a smart hub, BrainOS could allow people to customize their homes just by showing the house sensors examples of what they want. For instance, says the firm, an elderly person could teach remote-controlled lights to turn on or off in response to a hand gesture or an everyday activity such as climbing into bed. A TV could learn to pause when somebody enters the room or mute when you want to take a phone call. Automated cabinets and drawers could be taught to open and close. So instead of us having to adapt to our houses, BrainOS would allow the house to adapt to us.
The little roaming robots are still the cutest though.
“Right now 3D printing is pretty attractive, so the whole robot shell is 3D printed,” said Passot, noting that once printed, one could simply buy the brain and then assemble it all together to get “a little, cute little rover, which is kind of cool.”
When hooked up to camera sensors the robots get the gift of stereo vision, and the speaker in its belly can respond to cues and let its owner know if it’s ready to learn, or tired, or needs help. “It’s also got wifi, so it’s sort of telepathic,” Passot joked.
Ok, maybe that’s a little too creepy!
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