What Can I Do Here? Learning New Skills by Imagining Visual Affordances
How do humans become so skillful? Well, initially we are not, but from infancy, we discover and practice increasingly complex skills through self-supervised play. But this play is not random - the child development literature suggests that infants use their prior experience to conduct directed exploration of affordances like movability, suckability, graspability, and digestibility through interaction and sensory feedback. This type of affordance directed exploration allows infants to learn both what can be done in a given environment and how to do it. Can we instantiate an analogous strategy in a robotic learning system?
On the left we see videos from a prior dataset collected with a robot accomplishing various tasks such as drawer opening and closing, as well as grasping and relocating objects. On the right we have a lid that the robot has never seen before. The robot has been granted a short period of time to practice with the new object, after which it will be given a goal image and tasked with making the scene match this image. How can the robot rapidly learn to manipulate the environment and grasp this lid without any external supervision?
To do so, we face several challenges. When a robot is dropped in a new environment, it must be able to use its prior knowledge to think of potentially useful behaviors that the environment affords. Then, the robot has to be able to actually practice these behaviors informatively. To now improve itself in the new environment, the robot must then be able to evaluate its own success somehow without an externally provided reward.
