Ready for that long-awaited summer vacation? First, you’ll need to pack all items required for your trip into a suitcase, making sure everything fits securely without crushing anything fragile.
Because humans possess strong visual and geometric reasoning skills, this is usually a straightforward problem, even if it may take a bit of finagling to squeeze everything in.
To a robot, though, it is an extremely complex planning challenge that requires thinking simultaneously about many actions, constraints, and mechanical capabilities. Finding an effective solution could take the robot a very long time — if it can even come up with one.
Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA Research have developed a novel algorithm that dramatically speeds up the robot’s planning process. Their approach enables a robot to “think ahead” by evaluating thousands of possible solutions in parallel and then refining the best ones to meet the constraints of the robot and its environment.