
A Peek Inside Google’s Efforts to Create a General-Purpose Robot - mortenjorck
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-30/a-peek-inside-google-s-efforts-to-create-a-general-purpose-robot
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dcre
This article is virtually content-free. "Google are building robots. They've
hired some people. Those robots may or may not be grabbing objects."

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mappingbabeljc
It's handy knowing they're fiddling with ROS, and the research papers show use
of DNN&RL for robotics via simulated tasks with actions keying off of raw
pixel inputs (paper:
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.02971v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.02971v1.pdf)),
and grasp paper shows ambitions on dexterous manipulation. I think valuable to
have some idea of the research areas. I'm biased because I wrote the article,
though! Aiming to produce a more granular article as soon as I can report it
out.

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dcre
Sorry to be a hater. I think the average HN reader knows a lot more about this
than the average Bloomberg reader.

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sinatra
After 10-15 years of incremental improvements in web & mobile apps, I have
started feeling that technology has finally started to try to solve real
problems. General purpose robots, self driving cars, internet of things,
virtual / augmented reality, etc are all very interesting! The kinds of things
that people in 70s & 80s would think we'd have in 2010s. I'm getting excited
about future again!

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drcode
I'm always happy to hear of any scraps that leak out of Google's robotics/AI
divisions. There is no certainty that we'll see human level AI in our
lifetime, but I am pretty confident we'll see machines master the basic
physical world- Anything from cleaning to building houses to driving etc etc
will be possible with only limited human intervention.

