{"id":1202,"date":"2018-02-17T15:36:24","date_gmt":"2018-02-17T23:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2021-10-31T20:45:13","modified_gmt":"2021-11-01T03:45:13","slug":"many-robots-take-screw-light-bulb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/2018\/02\/17\/many-robots-take-screw-light-bulb\/","title":{"rendered":"How many robots does it take to screw in a light bulb?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As technology continues to improve over the coming years, we are beginning to see increased integration of robotics into our daily lives. Imagine if these robots were capable of receiving general instructions regarding a task, and they were able to learn, work, and communicate as a team to complete that task with no additional guidance. Our guest this week on Inspiration Dissemination, Connor Yates a Robotics<\/a> PhD student in the College of Engineering, studies artificial intelligence and machine learning and wants to make the above hypothetical scenario a reality. Connor and other members of the Autonomous Agents and Distributed Intelligence Laboratory<\/a> are keenly interested in distributed reinforcement learning, optimization, and control in large complex robotics systems. Applications of this include multi-robot coordination, mobile robot navigation, transportation systems, and intelligent energy management.<\/p>\n

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Connor Yates.<\/p><\/div>\n

A long time Beaver and native Oregonian, Connor grew up on the eastern side of the state. His father was a botanist, which naturally translated to a lot of time spent in the woods during his childhood. This, however, did not deter his aspirations of becoming a mechanical engineer building rockets for NASA. Fast forward to his first term of undergraduate here at Oregon State University\u2014while taking his first mechanical engineering course, he realized rocket science wasn\u2019t the academic field he wanted to pursue. After taking numerous different courses, one piqued his interest, computer science. He then went on to flourish in the computer science program eventually meeting his current Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Kagan Tumer<\/a>. Connor worked with Dr. Tumer for two of his undergraduate years, and completed his undergraduate honors thesis investigating the improvement to gauge the intent of multiple robots working together in one system.<\/p>\n

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Connor taking in a view at Glacier National Park 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

Currently, Connor is working on improving the ability for machines to learn by implementing a reward system; think of a \u201cgood robot\u201d and \u201cbad robot\u201d system. Using computer simulations, a robot can be assigned a general task. Robots usually begin learning a task with many failed attempts, but through the reward system, good behaviors can be enforced and behaviors that do not relate to the assigned task can be discouraged. Over thousands of trials, the robot eventually learns what to do and completes the task. Simple, right? However, this becomes incredibly more complex when a team of robots are assigned to learn a task. Connor focuses on rewarding not just successful completion an assigned task, but also progress toward completing the task. For example, say you have a table that requires six robots to move. When two robots attempt the task and fail, rather than just view it as a failed task, robots are capable of learning that two robots are not enough and recruit more robots until successful completion of the task. This is seen as a step wise progression toward success rather than an all or nothing type situation. It is Connor\u2019s hope that one day in the future a robot team could not only complete a task but also report reasons why a decision was made to complete an assigned task.<\/p>\n

In Connor\u2019s free time he enjoys getting involved in the many PAC courses<\/a> that are offered here at Oregon State University, getting outside, and trying to teach his household robot how to bring him a beer from the fridge.<\/p>\n

Tune in to 88.7 FM at 7:00 PM Sunday evening to hear more about Connor and his research on artificial intelligence, or stream the program live<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As technology continues to improve over the coming years, we are beginning to see increased integration of robotics into our daily lives. Imagine if these robots were capable of receiving general instructions regarding a task, and they were able to learn, work, and communicate as a team to complete that task with no additional guidance. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7039,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1305552,1264,1231,2358,1305546],"tags":[741204,161022,872,3515,1024656,2479,97034,1024652,1024655],"class_list":["post-1202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-college-of-engineering","category-computer-science","category-mechanical-engineering","category-robotics","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-beaver","tag-engineering","tag-graduate","tag-machine-learning","tag-robotics","tag-robots","tag-rocket-science","tag-task"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7039"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2090,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions\/2090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}