Here a long time amateur cook, very interested in how this could all be well automated. Starting to see it in fast food. Like also the connection to things like clothing.
Solving the challenges of robotic pizza-making
A new technique could enable a robot to manipulate squishy objects like pizza dough or soft materials like clothing.
Adam Zewe | MIT News Office Publication Date: March 31, 2022
Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot.
For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is tricky because the shape of dough can change in many ways, which are difficult to represent with an equation. Plus, creating a new shape out of that dough requires multiple steps and the use of different tools. It is especially difficult for a robot to learn a manipulation task with a long sequence of steps — where there are many possible choices — since learning often occurs through trial and error.
Researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California at San Diego, have come up with a better way. They created a framework for a robotic manipulation system that uses a two-stage learning process, which could enable a robot to perform complex dough-manipulation tasks over a long timeframe. A “teacher” algorithm solves each step the robot must take to complete the task. Then, it trains a “student” machine-learning model that learns abstract ideas about when and how to execute each skill it needs during the task, like using a rolling pin. With this knowledge, the system reasons about how to execute the skills to complete the entire task.
The researchers show that this method, which they call DiffSkill, can perform complex manipulation tasks in simulations, like cutting and spreading dough, or gathering pieces of dough from around a cutting board, while outperforming other machine-learning methods. .... '
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