Agility using large language models to communicate with its humanoid robots
Technology
Top universities, research labs exploring methods for leveraging artificial intelligence platforms
(Web Desk) –A number of top universities, research labs and companies are exploring the best methods for leveraging artificial intelligence platforms.
Well-funded Oregon-based startup Agility has been playing around with the tech for a while now using its bipedal robot, Digit.
“[W]e were curious to see what can be achieved by integrating this technology into Digit,” the company notes.
“A physical embodiment of artificial intelligence created a demo space with a series of numbered towers of several heights, as well as three boxes with multiple defining characteristics.
Digit was given information about this environment, but was not given any specific information about its tasks, just natural language commands of varying complexity to see if it can execute them.”
Agility notes, “Our innovation team developed this interactive demo to show how LLMs could make our robots more versatile and faster to deploy.
The demo enables people to talk to Digit in natural language and ask it to do tasks, giving a glimpse at the future.”
Natural language communication has been a key potential application for this technology, along with the ability to program systems via low- and no-code technologies.
During my Disrupt panel, Gill Pratt described how the Toyota Research Institute is using generative AI to accelerate robotic learning,
We have figured out how to do something, which is use modern generative AI techniques that enable human demonstration of both position and force to essentially teach a robot from just a handful of examples.
The code is not changed at all. What this is based on is something called diffusion policy. It’s work that we did in collaboration with Columbia and MIT. We’ve taught 60 different skills so far.
