Robots given visual foresight to predict their actions

The technology from the University of California, Berkeley could one day help self-driving cars anticipate future events on the road and produce more intelligent robotic assistants in homes. The initial prototype, however, focuses on learning manual skills entirely from autonomous play.

Using visual foresight, robots can predict what their cameras will see if they perform a particular sequence of movements. These robotic imaginations are still relatively simple for now - predictions made only several seconds into the future - but they are enough for the robot to ascertain how to move objects around on a table without disturbing obstacles.

The robot can learn to perform these tasks without any help from humans or prior knowledge about physics, its environment or what the objects are. That's because the visual imagination is learned entirely from scratch from unattended and unsupervised exploration, where the robot plays with objects on a table. After this phase, the robot builds a predictive model of the world, and can use this model to manipulate new objects that it has not seen before.