Facebook’s AI team is teaching robots what human trait?

Right now, a robot that has to navigate around a home, like a robotic vacuum, knows what a refrigerator is when it sees one, but unlike a human, it doesn’t necessarily know that that means it’s in the kitchen. Therefore, if a piece of furniture gets moved, it can disorient the robot unless one takes the time to manually program it with the object’s new location.

A team of researchers from Facebook’s AI program and Carnegie Mellon University are teaming up to change that. Using a system dubbed Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration, the team is using machine learning to teach robots a little bit of common sense when it comes to the placement of household furniture.