A robot created by Columbia Engineers created a robot that learns to understand itself and examines the things around it.

Our perception of our body is not always accurate or realistic as any athlete or fashion-conscious person knows. But it is a very important factor in how we behave in public. Your brain is constantly preparing for action as you play ball or dress so that you can move your body without crashing, tripping, or falling. A team from Columbia Engineering recently announced that they have developed a robot that can learn from scratch a model of its entire body without any human assistance. In a paper recently published in Science Robotics, the researchers describe how their robot builds its own kinematic model and uses it to plan movements, reach targets, and avoid obstacles in a variety of scenarios. Moreover, thanks to this model, the researchers automatically detected and corrected the damage to the robots’ bodies.

Robot Observing Itself Through The Mirror

To study the model, the researchers placed a robotic arm in a circle of five streaming video cameras. The robot observed itself from the cameras as it moved freely. Like a baby discovering himself for the first time in a hall of mirrors, the robot moves to learn exactly how its body moves in response to various motor commands. After about three hours, the robot stopped. The internal deep neural network has finished learning the relationship between the robot’s motor movements and the volume it occupies around it.

On the other hand, Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Columbia Creative Machines Lab, where the study was conducted, stated that they imagine how the robot sees itself, but that they cannot simply stare at a neural network. Lipson noted that a kind of slightly trembling cloud enveloped the robot’s body. Moreover, Lipson added to his explanation that as the robot moves, the cloud begins to follow it.

Self-Modeling Robots

The ability of robots to model themselves without the help of engineers is crucial in many ways. The first is that they save labor. Another important factor is that it allows the robot to keep up with its own wear and tear and even detect and compensate for damage.

Boyuan Chen, who led the study, states that people have a clear self-concept. In other words, Chen stated that we have a self-concept somewhere in our brains. Our brains have a self-model that tells us what volume of our immediate environment we occupy. Also, this model shows how this volume changes as we move.

Self-Awareness and Robots

The work is, in a nutshell, part of Lipson’s quest to find ways to raise a kind of self-awareness. Lipson stated that self-modeling is a more primitive version of self-awareness. For example, if an animal, human, or robot has the right model, it may function better in the world.

Researchers are aware of the limits, risks, and controversies surrounding giving machines greater autonomy through self-awareness. Lipson states that the self-awareness shown in this study is insignificant compared to that of humans. But they accept that they have to start somewhere.

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