The film ‘Her’ presented a futuristic vision of a world in 2013. It presented artificial intelligence (AI) and humans could form deep and meaningful relationships. It is like pure science fiction but advancements in robotics as well as AI are bringing us closer to a reality. Machines can understand and interact with the world in ways we never thought would be possible. Pittsburgh robotics startup Skild AI is at the forefront of such revolution. It was founded by Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak in 2023. Both of them are professors at Carnegie Mellon University and graduates of IIT-Kanpur.
The idea behind Skild AI emerged from the observation that robotics was transitioning from controlled laboratory settings to real-world applications. Deepak Pathak noted that traditional robots often fail at basic tasks due to a lack of adequate data and an overemphasis on hardware. His team realized that robots need to be useful in everyday life and hence needed a brain that could learn from experience much like humans do.
Language models of OpenAI and Google analyze text data to understand patterns and predict word occurrences. The approach of Skild AI is different and it is to focus on physical interactions. Brain of a robot must understand how to move, how to apply force and how to interact with objects. It requires a completely different kind of learning compared to language models. Language models might know that microwave is associated with appliances. However, the models don’t understand the mechanics of opening a microwave door. Skild AI model is designed to map objects to actions directly. It is something very similar to how humans learn through physical interactions.
Abhinav Gupta said that the core issue in robotics is not a hardware problem but a software one and they aim to enable these machines to perform basic functions. This vision has been moved from being task-specific to becoming general-purpose tools which are capable of handling a wide range of queries and commands.
