An AI algorithm has finally conquered a task most people take for granted: putting on clothes in the morning.
Clumsy act: Getting dressed is surprisingly hard for a machine to figure out, because it involves wrangling a piece of very flexible material. Think about the awkward motions you go through when donning a sweater: you have to tug the cloth and move your body in just the right way to get it over your arms and head without tearing it.
(Don’t) let it rip: Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology programmed a humanoid character to figure out the task by itself, even when the starting position and shape of the garment changed. They did so with a reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithm, a machine-learning technique. Inspired by the way we train animals, RL uses rewards and penalties to get an AI agent to achieve a desired goal. In this instance, the algorithm rewarded behaviors that led the humanoid to put its limbs and head through the right holes and penalized behaviors that could cause the garment to rip.
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