BOSTON (WHDH) - Don’t have enough time to cook breakfast in the morning? Tired of brewing your own coffee? Sick of vacuuming, cleaning and doing laundry? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may soon have a solution.
MIT has teamed up with the University of Toronto to create software aimed at outsourcing your daily chores to robot maids.
Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory unveiled “Virtual Home,” a system that can simulate detailed household tasks and then have artificial “agents” execute them, opening up the possibility of one day teaching robots to do such tasks.
They trained the system using nearly 3,000 programs of various activities, which are further broken down into subtasks for the computer to understand. A simple task like “making coffee,” for example, would also include the step “grabbing a cup.”
Researchers demonstrated VirtualHome in a 3-D world inspired by the Sims video game.
The team’s artificial agent can execute 1,000 of these interactions in the Sims-style world, with eight different scenes including a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and home office.
Because robots require detailed instruction and programming, scientists say they will train the agents using actual videos instead of simulation.
It’s not clear when robotic maids will be available for use. For now, we will all keep fetching out own beverages.
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