RoboBrain: The World’s First Knowledge Engine For Robots
From the post:
One of the most exciting changes influencing modern life is the ability to search and interact with information on a scale that has never been possible before. All this is thanks to a convergence of technologies that have resulted in services such as Google Now, Siri, Wikipedia and IBM’s Watson supercomputer.
This gives us answers to a wide range of questions on almost any topic simply by whispering a few words into a smart phone or typing a few characters into a laptop. Part of what makes this possible is that humans are good at coping with ambiguity. So the answer to a simple question such as “how to make cheese on toast” can result in very general instructions that an ordinary person can easily follow.
For robots, the challenge is quite different. These machines require detailed instructions even for the simplest task. For example, a robot asking a search engine “how to bring sweet tea from the kitchen” is unlikely to get the detail it needs to carry out the task since it requires all kinds of incidental knowledge such as the idea that cups can hold liquid (but not when held upside down), that water comes from taps and can be heated in a kettle or microwave, and so on.
The truth is that if robots are ever to get useful knowledge from search engines, these databases will have to contain a much more detailed description of every task that they might need to carry out.
Enter Ashutosh Saxena at Stanford University in Palo Alto and a number of pals, who have set themselves the task of building such knowledge engine for robots.
These guys have already begun creating a kind of Google for robots that can be freely accessed by any device wishing to carry out a task. At the same time, the database gathers new information about these tasks as robots perform them, thereby learning as it goes. They call their new knowledge engine RoboBrain.
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An overview of: arxiv.org/abs/1412.0691 RoboBrain: Large-Scale Knowledge Engine for Robots.
See the website as well: RoboBrain.me
Not quite AI but something close.
If nothing else, the project should identify a large amount of tacit knowledge that is generally overlooked.