So classical robotics yeah, people used to write code for each step of opening a door. Practically speaking you would probably not do motion planning on the door, you would just code it up with a bunch of heuristics like, try to be over here in relation to the doorframe because that's a good opening spot and will probably work. Ok you're in the right place? Now, move gripper towards the door handle... etc. Bunch of hacks. Put enough hacks together and you can kinda sorta open (some) doors. Oh this is a SLIDING door? Damn we forgot to code for that...
The way things are going is sensors (cameras, force, etc) and neural networks. You let the robot try a bunch of ways of opening doors, sometimes it doors itself in the face, eventually it'll figure out good places to stand based on what the door looks like. The more doors you make it try to open hopefully the better it gets at generalising over the task of opening doors. The hacks/heuristics are really still there but the robot is supposed to learn them.
> Surely people don’t stop in front of a door and begin planning things out, rather they seem to go for it and adjust on the fly, is this an approach that won’t work in robotics? Why not?
Yeah, figuring out how to do this is basically "the problem". Most people don't have a sense or feeling of "planning things out" as they open a door because we reached "unconscious competence" at that task. We definitely have predictions of what is going to happen as we start opening the door based on prior experience and our observations so far. If reality diverges from our expectations we will experience surprise, make some new predictions, take actions to resolve the surprise, etc.
Not sure that anyone has ever studied how people open doors in detail, it'd be interesting. I bet there are a ton of subtle micro behaviours. One that I know is, if you hear kids running in the house it is a good idea to keep a foot planted in front of you as you approach the door, because those guys will absolutely fling or crash doors open right into your face.
Thank you, great answer. As soon as I had asked my question I realized that we must have a lot of unconscious behaviours. Very interesting points about surprise/expectations. And top marks for the advice about kids
The way things are going is sensors (cameras, force, etc) and neural networks. You let the robot try a bunch of ways of opening doors, sometimes it doors itself in the face, eventually it'll figure out good places to stand based on what the door looks like. The more doors you make it try to open hopefully the better it gets at generalising over the task of opening doors. The hacks/heuristics are really still there but the robot is supposed to learn them.
> Surely people don’t stop in front of a door and begin planning things out, rather they seem to go for it and adjust on the fly, is this an approach that won’t work in robotics? Why not?
Yeah, figuring out how to do this is basically "the problem". Most people don't have a sense or feeling of "planning things out" as they open a door because we reached "unconscious competence" at that task. We definitely have predictions of what is going to happen as we start opening the door based on prior experience and our observations so far. If reality diverges from our expectations we will experience surprise, make some new predictions, take actions to resolve the surprise, etc.
Not sure that anyone has ever studied how people open doors in detail, it'd be interesting. I bet there are a ton of subtle micro behaviours. One that I know is, if you hear kids running in the house it is a good idea to keep a foot planted in front of you as you approach the door, because those guys will absolutely fling or crash doors open right into your face.