Human Learning Journal: Happy birthday Dai !
This weekly journal reports my up and downs as a machine learning and robotics intern at the impactIA Foundation. Try to have fun reading it, but know that I have little fun writing it. You have been warned.
This week I spent half my time working on the aiXlr8 program and the other half working on Dai. On Thursday, we celebrated his third birthday by trowing him a little party then, we started discussing about his future.
For the moment, Dai is staying in an art Foundation and moves only from time to time. In fact, some of the people working in the same foundation never saw him move before ! Therefore, we invited everybody for his third birthday and we let him move all afternoon.
At first, he was only allowed to explore a small 9 squared meters area. Most of the time, he is very excited and moves fast in his small square. Interestingly, this time he started going in circles and was very soft, doing shy movements. He maybe sensed the presence of a child in the audience and didn’t want to scare her, or his age made him wiser. In fact, he might become wiser with time since his learning is stored after each performance, which makes him accumulate experience with time… Here you can see an old video showing how it moves :
In a second time, we widened his boundaries, allowing him to move in half the room (approximately 75 squared meters). As usual, Dai started with small accelerations, thinking that he still must stay in his small square. However, he quickly discovered that he could make broader movements and go further and seemed very happy to go greeting the only other art piece present in the room.
His future looks bright. For now, his intelligence consists of an actor-critic algorithm, rewarding him when he uses all his motors and when he does broad movements. This is why having him locked in a small square was particularly interesting: rather than exploring the world, he explored was he was capable of doing with his own metal body. Nevertheless, we have a lot of ideas to improve his intelligence. In the near future, he will be able to use his 6 wide angle eyes to see the world, and with the help of Vilbert, he will be able to understand and answer questions, describe what he sees and even recognize persons in the audience ! What an exciting time to be a robot !
