Global thermonuclear war. The slight possibility that a massive asteroid could boop Earth. Jenga. These are a few of the things that give humans debilitating anxiety.
Robots can’t solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they’ve engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. This, though, is no game—it’s a big step in the daunting quest to get robots to manipulate objects in the real world.
The process went like this. The researchers equipped an industrial robot arm with a force sensor in its wrist and a two-pronged manipulator, and sat it down in front of a Jenga tower. The robot got its sense of sight from a camera trained on the tower.
But the researchers didn’t teach it how to win against a human. Instead, the researchers asked the robot to do some exploring, probing blocks at random. “It knows what the blocks look like and where they are, but it doesn't really understand how they interact with each other,” says MIT roboticist Nima Fazeli, lead author on the new paper.
As the robot explored, it discovered that some blocks are looser and require less pressure to move, while others are harder to budge. Like a human Jenga player, the robot has no way of knowing by sight alone what is going to be a good brick to tackle. “You look at the tower and your eyes don't tell you anything about which piece you should touch,” says MIT mechanical engineer Alberto Rodriguez, coauthor on the paper. “That information comes from probing it—it requires interactive perception.” With both sight and touch, the physics of a Jenga tower become more apparent.