Students Developing Home Robot That Can Tidy a House on its Own
By Nathan Deen
Struggling with keeping your home clean and organized? You may soon have an extra set of hands to help around the house.
Imagine a home robot that can keep a house tidy without being given any commands from its owner. Well, the next step in home robotics is here — at least virtually.
A group of doctoral and master’s students from the School of Interactive Computing, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Toronto, believe they have created the benchmark for a home robot that can keep an entire house tidy.
In their paper, Housekeep: Tidying Virtual Households Using Commonsense Reasoning, Georgia Tech doctoral candidates Harsh Agrawal and Andrew Szot, master’s students Arun Ramachandran and Sriram Yenamandra, and Yash Kant, a former research visitor at Georgia Tech who is now a doctoral candidate at Toronto, set out to prove an embodied artificial intelligence (AI) could conduct simple housekeeping tasks without explicit instructions.
‘Housekeep’ in Action
Housekeep is a benchmark to evaluate commonsense reasoning in the home for embodied AI. In Housekeep, an embodied agent must tidy a house by rearranging misplaced objects without explicit instructions specifying which objects need to be rearranged. Instead, the agent must learn from and is evaluated against human preferences of which objects belong where in a tidy house. Researchers collect a dataset of where humans typically place objects in tidy and untidy houses constituting 1799 objects, 268 object categories, 585 placements, and 105 rooms.