Pizza-making robots are paving the way to highly complex AI

pcgamer.com:

MIT researchers have been working on something truly life changing: dough-rolling robots. It's not just about making pizza, but perhaps some day in the near future, you could have one of the most advanced AI's to date prepping your takeout. Could a robot ever truly replace the extraordinary pizza spinning skill of our own meat-bag professionals, though?

The project, named DiffSkill, is still in its early stages. As the report from MIT News notes, it's not so easy teaching a robot to work with a deformable object. That's because the subject matter is always changing shape and consistency, so the neural network needs to adapt on the fly.

Right now, it takes AI long enough to learn an unchanging assault course, let alone keep up as the task changes before it.

Of course, we have self driving cars that can adapt to their environment as it changes, so it's not a wholly impossible task. And at least there's less risk involved with designing a robot that just chops and rolls dough, but it's still a task that comes with it's fair share of hurdles.

It involves two stages: A 'teacher' algorithm first lays out the necessary steps for the task, before a 'student' machine-learning model turns those steps into reality, learning abstractly about when and how each step should be undertaken.

One author of the DiffSkill research paper, Yunzhu Li, explains  «This method is closer to how we as humans plan our actions.»  We have a higher-level planner that roughly tells us what the stages are and some of the intermediate goals we need to achieve along the way, and then we execute them."

Li's Co-author, Xingyu Lin, notes «Our framework provides a novel way for robots to acquire new skills. These skills can then be chained to solve more complex