Cheap gloves will teach robots to determine the shape and weight of objects

Man has an amazing and extremely useful.skill - he can touch his glasses, smartphone and other items he needs in the dark. Many engineers really want to equip their robots with this skill, but for artificial intelligence training they lack data on the shape of objects and their mass. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have figured out how to quickly and inexpensively gather the necessary information - they have developed a STAG glove that collects data on human tactile sensations.

These gloves already exist, but are equippedonly 50 gauges and cost thousands of dollars. In contrast, STAG is made from affordable materials, equipped with 550 tiny sensors and costs only $ 10. Even small startups that create robots and prosthetic human hands can afford it. This is really a valuable invention, because thanks to it robots will be able to get more dexterous manipulators, and prostheses will gain greater realism.

Cheap gloves for teaching artificial intelligence

The collection of data on the shape and mass of objects occursin a very predictable way - a person puts on a glove connected to a computer and picks up various objects. The researchers tried to make the sample as diverse as possible so that artificial intelligence would have a wide range of knowledge.

Thus, the researchers collected 135,000fragments of tactile data on 26 ordinary items, among which were soda cans, scissors, tennis balls and tableware. Subsequently, the convolutional neural network used the collected information to recognize specific objects — an accuracy of an impressive 76%.

In addition to data on the shape of objects, the glove collected11,600 pieces of weight data. For this, she recorded the pressure with which a person’s fingers hold each object — thanks to this data, artificial intelligence learned to determine the mass of objects with an accuracy of 60 grams.

Gloves equipped with all kinds of electronicscreated for completely different purposes. For example, in 2018, researchers from two universities developed a glove that allows you to touch objects inside virtual reality. You can read about this invention in our material.

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