Adaptive robot without pre-training beats top model with up to 93% better performance on Meta’s Habitat benchmark

Bottom Line Up Front

Today’s robots rely on pre-programming and pre-training and have difficulty operating in the real world where conditions are constantly changing.  No amount of hardcoding and pre-training will allow a robot to adapt to the curveballs and anomalies they will invariably encounter outside of controlled environments or on real world multi-step tasks.  What if, instead of following instructions or parroting training data, robots are given some basic principles to work within such as “collisions should be avoided” and “there’s a possibility that its actions might fail” combined with a sort of mental model of their environment that allow them to figure out how to optimally fulfill its goals on its own?  Robots that can adapt would be exponentially more useful and applicable than they are today.

Care to know how?  Read on…