Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot does not know if it is a spider, a snake, an arm—it has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of “babbling,” and within about a day of intensive computing, their robot creates a self-simulation. The robot can then use that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. The work is published today in Science Robotics .

New York, NY—January 30, 2019—Robots that are self-aware have been science fiction fodder for decades, and now we may finally be getting closer. Humans are unique in being able to imagine themselves—to picture themselves in future scenarios, such as walking along the beach on a warm sunny day. Humans can also learn by revisiting past experiences and reflecting on what went right or wrong. While humans and animals acquire and adapt their self-image over their lifetime, most robots still learn using human-provided simulators and models, or by laborious, time-consuming trial and error. Robots have not learned to simulate themselves the way humans do.

The study is titled “Task-Agnostic Self-Modeling Machines.” Authors are: Robert Kwiatkowski, Department of Computer Science, and Hod Lipson, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia Engineering, and Data Science Institute, Columbia University. The study was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA MTO HR0011-18-2-0020).

Video of Columbia Engineering robot that learns what it is, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of “babbling,” and within about a day of intensive computing, the robot creates a self-simulation, which it can then use to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its body.

To date, robots have operated by having a human explicitly model the robot. “But if we want robots to become independent, to adapt quickly to scenarios unforeseen by their creators, then it’s essential that they learn to simulate themselves,” says Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, and director of the Creative Machines lab, where the research was done. For the study, Lipson and his PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski used a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm. Initially, the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories, each comprising one hundred points. The robot then used deep learning, a modern machine learning technique, to create a self-model. The first self-models were quite inaccurate, and the robot did not know what it was, or how its joints were connected. But after less than 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within about four centimeters. The self-model performed a pick-and-place task in a closed loop system that enabled the robot to recalibrate its original position between each step along the trajectory based entirely on the internal self-model. With the closed loop control, the robot was able to grasp objects at specific locations on the ground and deposit them into a receptacle with 100 percent success. Even in an open-loop system, which involves performing a task based entirely on the internal self-model, without any external feedback, the robot was able to complete the pick-and-place task with a 44 percent success rate. “That's like trying to pick up a glass of water with your eyes closed, a process difficult even for humans,” observed the study’s lead author Kwiatkowski, a PhD student in the computer science department who works in Lipson’s lab.



If we want robots to become independent, to adapt quickly to scenarios unforeseen by their creators, then it’s essential that they learn to simulate themselves Hod Lipson Professor of Mechanical Engineering