Toyota Trains Their Robots To Be In-home Helpers With VR

Saanvi Araav - Oct 09, 2019

This new VR training will allow human teachers to see what the robots are seeing in 3D. Then, the teachers could give instructions to the robot

We all know the benefits and conveniences of having home robots. They make our daily lives so much easier. It allows our senior citizens to live much more independently. However, the process of training robots to function safely and effectively in our homes is not easy. Mainly because each house's layouts are uniques. Moreover, we all filled our houses with lots of decorations and furniture in countless layouts and combinations.

A New Way Of Teaching

TRI (Toyota Research Institute ) has come up with a really cool solution for this. They used VR tech to innovate the training of robots.

This new VR training will allow human teachers to see what the robots are seeing in 3D. Then, the teachers could instruct the robot to annotate the surrounding 3D scene; he or she could add in a note on how to handle the situation.

VR-robots-toyata — The teachers could instruct the under-teaching robot to annotate the surrounding 3D scene; he or she could add in a note on how to handle the situation

This technology allows the teachers to teach their robots those arbitrary tasks with various types of objects. This way is faster than the normal teaching method of specific functions in a more controlled setting.

The system of TRI allows robots to be much more flexible and adaptable. They don't need a fully detailed map of the home. We only need to teach them to understand those objects which are relevant to their actions, tasks. Plus, thanks to the fleet learning capability, when one robot learned a task, all of them will too.

Still In Development

However, the system is not yet perfect. Like in the video, TRI reminded the viewers that they do not make product concepts, but research prototypes. Even though a VR-based teaching system could really change how we teach our robot and how we could use them in various settings.