Imagine robots straining to grip door handles. Or lifting plastic bananas and dropping them into dog bowls. Or struggling to push Lego pieces around a metal bin.
If you visited the laboratory of professor Sergey Levine at the University of California at Berkeley, you might see some puzzling scenes.
We want to put our robots into an environment where they can explore, where they can essentially play, says Levine, an assistant professor who runs the Robotic Artificial Intelligence and Learning Lab within the Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at Berkeley, which is a participant in our NVIDIA AI Labs initiative.
Playground: Sergey Levine's robotics lab may one day be home to robots that learn by playing. Why would robots be playing? Because a key to intelligence may be the way that creatures learn about their physical environment by poking at things, pushing things and observing what happens.
The only proof of the existence of intelligence is in humans, and humans exist in a physical world, they're embodied, explains Levine. In fact, all intelligent creatures we know are embodied. Perhaps they don't have to be, but we don't know that.
Hence, I see the robotics as actually a lens on artificial intelligence more broadly, he says.
From the Bottom Up One of the biggest lessons of robotics over many years, says Levine, is that it confirms Moravec's Paradox.
Hans Moravec, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics, wrote about a dichotomy in AI in his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence.
Machines can be taught to do well things humans find hard, such as mastering the game of chess. But machines do poorly at what is easy for us, such as basic motor skills.
If you want a machine to play chess, it is actually comparatively quite easy, observes Levine. If you want a machine to pick up the chess pieces, that is incredibly difficult.
Moravec viewed that dichotomy as a giant clue to the problem of constructing machines that think. He argued for building up intelligence by following the path of Darwinian evolution. That is, the gradual development, from the bottom up, of basic sensorimotor systems and then, much later, higher reasoning.
No Cats There's a parallel to deep learning, such as the breakthroughs in image recognition with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Neural networks that automatically learn the most basic features in data - edge detectors and corner detectors, say - can then assemble hierarchies of representation.
What we saw was that a method that can figure out those low-level features can then also figure out the higher-level features, says Levine.
Coffee anyone? Teaching machines to learn will be key to creating robots able to live and work alongside humans. Unlike pictures of cats on the internet, however, there isn't a ready supply of data for robots to learn from. Hence his lab's focus on having machines explore the environment for weeks, autonomously pushing things around, manipulating objects and then learning something about their world.
Levine uses a variety of machine learning techniques to train robots, including CNNs but also, especially, reinforcement learning, where a route to a destination is planned by inferring from a current state to a goal state. The policy is then used by the robot at test time to carry out new instances of those tasks.
During the training phase, the play with objects is unsupervised. There is no hand-engineering by humans of the precise movements the robot should make to carry out a task. Nor is the goal even specified.
The neural network figures out what goal it should accomplish, and then figures out what policies, including angles of movement of its appendages, can lead to that goal.
Learning to Learn' Training makes use of clusters of NVIDIA GPUs in an offsite facility. During test time, a single GPU is attached to each robot, which is used to run the policies that have been learned. In some more ambitious tests, such as learning a new policy from watching a video demonstration by a human, a more powerful NVIDIA DGX-1 is attached to each machine.
Says Levine, GPU compute power has brought two benefits to AI. By speeding up training, it allows us to do science faster. Second, during inference, the power of GPUs allows for real-time response, something that is a really big deal for robots.
When the robot is actually in the physical world, if it's doing something dynamic, such as flying at a closed door, as in the case of a drone, it needs to figure out the door's closed before it hits it.
The work of Levine and his staff with reinforcement learning has evolved to greater levels of sophistication. It's one thing to teach a robot to perform a task at test time similar to what it learned in training. More ambitious is for the robot to learn new policies for problem solving at test time on tasks that are novel. The machine is learning to learn, says Levine.
The latter, called meta-learning, is an increasing focus of his lab. In a recent paper, One-shot Hierarchical Imitation Learning of Compound Visuomotor Tasks, a robot first watches a human demonstrate a simple, primitive task, such as dropping an object into a bowl. It develops a policy to imitate that action.
At test time, the robot is shown a compound task, such as dropping the object in the bowl and then moving the bowl along the table. The robot uses its prior experience with the simple tasks to compose a sequence of policies by which to perform actions in succession.
The Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at Berkeley is a participant in our NVIDIA AI Labs initiative. Levine's robots were able to imitate the human's demonstration of the compound task after seeing it demonstrated just one time, what's known as single-sh
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
31/08/2025
Legrand | AV, a global specialist and industry leader in audiovisual solutions, returns to CEDIA Expo 2025, taking place Sept. 4-6 in Denver, with a powerful li...
31/08/2025
Global media technology company Backlight will unveil new capabilities in its Iconik, Wildmoka, and Zype product lines at IBC2025 (booth #1.D09), September 12 1...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
Imagine robots straining to grip door handles. Or lifting plastic bananas and dropping them into dog bowls. Or struggling to push Lego pieces around a metal bin.
