Can machine learning turn industrial robots into masters of assembly and construction?
03 August 2018
Autodesk: If
you dump a pile of toy bricks in front of a kid, not much time passes
before they figure out how to assemble something fun. The pieces may
come in different colors and sizes, but as long as they know how the
bricks snap together, children will make miniature versions of just
about anything they can imagine – from castles and skyscrapers to
spaceships and unicorns.
Autodesk customers also love to make things. But instead of having an
army of savvy kids, our customers are often using industrial robots to
assemble their products and
buildings. As precise and powerful as these machines may be, they’re
nowhere near as smart or adaptable as grade-school-aged humans.
But what if robots really could learn to assemble anything in the world
in the same way that a child learns how to make an airplane out of
colorful plastic bricks?
That is a much more complex challenge than it may seem to us
non-roboticists.
If you visit a factory today, you’re likely to find teams of people that
spend months or even years programming industrial robots to do just one
task, over and over again. Like, say, spot welding in precisely the same
location, all day every day, on an automotive assembly line.
The programming process is incredibly tedious, complicated, and
frequently error-prone. And since training robots is so time-intensive
and the result is a highly inflexible (even if productive) machine, the
outcome is a business
environment that restricts innovation. If it takes nine months to
program your robot to perform a single task, you’re not going to change
the design of your product or introduce new
technology into your factory – it would simply take too much time
and money.
Machine learning could change all of that.
For the past two years, a small team of researchers at Autodesk’s AI Lab
on Pier 9 in San Francisco has been working on a project called
Brickbot. Led by Mike Haley and Yotto Koga, the project aims to redefine
how our manufacturing and construction customers engage and collaborate
with robots.
(Fast Company had exclusive access to the project since early last year.
You can check out their take on Brickbot here.)
If you dump a pile of toy bricks in front of a kid, not much time passes
before they figure out how to assemble something fun. The pieces may
come in different colors and sizes, but as long as they know how the
bricks snap together, children will make miniature versions of just
about anything they can imagine – from castles and skyscrapers to
spaceships and unicorns.
Autodesk customers also love to make things. But instead of having an
army of savvy kids, our customers are often using industrial robots to
assemble their products and buildings. As precise and powerful as these
machines may be, they’re nowhere near as smart or adaptable as
grade-school-aged humans.
But what if robots really could learn to assemble anything in the world
in the same way that a child learns how to make an airplane out of
colorful plastic bricks?
That is a much more complex challenge than it may seem to us
non-roboticists.
If you visit a factory today, you’re likely to find teams of people that
spend months or even years programming industrial robots to do just one
task, over and over again. Like, say, spot welding in precisely the same
location, all day every day, on an automotive assembly line.
The programming process is incredibly tedious, complicated, and
frequently error-prone. And since training robots is so time-intensive
and the result is a highly inflexible (even if productive) machine, the
outcome is a business environment that restricts innovation. If it takes
nine months to program your robot to perform a single task, you’re not
going to change the design of your product or introduce new technology
into your factory – it would simply take too much time and money.
Machine learning could change all of that.
For the past two years, a small team of researchers at Autodesk’s AI Lab
on Pier 9 in San Francisco has been working on a project called
Brickbot. Led by Mike Haley and Yotto Koga, the project aims to redefine
how our manufacturing and construction customers engage and collaborate
with robots.
(Fast Company had exclusive access to the project since early last year.
You can check out their take on Brickbot here.)
This may seem like child’s play, but imagine what might be possible once
Brickbot’s automated assembly technology is built out and scaled up to
power the factories and construction sites of tomorrow. These
environments will require increased flexibility and adaptability,
because as our economies demand more customization of products and
buildings, changes to designs will need to be implemented seamlessly, in
real time.
“By starting with plastic bricks, we’ve been able to keep the project
manageable while still having the freedom to experiment from the design
stage all the way to a finished product,” said Koga, a software
architect with a PhD in robotics. “Now we’re close to taking the next
step. We’re planning to work closely with a manufacturing customer and a
construction customer to see how the Brickbot technology can be applied
in the real world.”
So, while Brickbot may currently be toying around with kid bricks, the
technology’s offspring may someday enable our industrial robot sidekicks
to make anything.
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Source: Autodesk - www.autodesk.com/
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