Opening locked doors using Human Level Artificial Intelligence

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DARPA, a defense agency of the US government has announced the Robot Challenge 2012 and the first contest will be held on Dec. of 2013. Their mission is to give money to Universities and technology companies to build them a robot that can do "mundane human tasks". According to the government, the reason for the the contest was to build robots that can do rescue and search missions. They wanted to build robots that can go into dangerous zones to do tasks. The Japan earthquake was one example.

There were several tasks (about 8 tasks) the human robot had to accomplish in the robot challenge. 1. walk around dangerous terrains. 2 open a locked door. 3. identify a broken pipe. 4. climb a ladder. 5. use tools, like a sledge hammer. 6. fix a broken pipe. 7. control vehicles with simple functions. 8. push buttons.

Basically, they are trying to build a robot that can think, act, and behave like a 5-year old child. Opening a locked door is a very difficult problem to solve in current AI (2013). If the door was locked and the robot didn't have the key, then how can the robot enter the house?? Human beings solve the problem by using common sense. They can use logic to come up with alternative methods to get into the house. For example, breaking the window and entering the house is one option. However, humans know that this method is not desirable because the owner has to pay for the window repairs. They can also find a spare key, which is usually hidden in a secret location. Or they can find someone that has the same key. These options are analyzed and a decision is made on what actions to take to open a locked door. This locked door problem has been an unsolvable problem for AI researchers since 1950.

In this video, the robot is playing a videogame, where a character in the game is locked in a dungeon. Within the dungeon are 2 locked doors and 1 hidden passage. The player's (the robot) mission is to get out of the dungeon. In order to do that, he has to unlock 2 doors and find the secret passage.

The robot uses common sense and logic to unlock doors. In one scene in the game, the player is locked inside a room. There is a guard on the floor that is dead and a locked door. Using common sense, the robot is able to understand that the guard usually has keys to unlock doors. He approaches the dead guard and searches him and finds the key. Next, the robot understand that locked doors require a key in order to open. So, the robot takes the keys from the guard and unlocks the door. Without common sense, the robot would not have been able to unlock the door. In other settings the environment might be even more complex. For example, there might be no keys and the player is forced to find alternative ways to get out (like finding a secret passage). Or the player can take an axe from the dead guard to chop open the locked door.

This video shows a robot trying to open locked doors. There are no sound in the video because I wanted to show the viewers what the robot is thinking while opening locked doors. The flashing text and freeze frames are the internal thoughts of the robot and not instruction text for the viewers. These internal thoughts describe the details of how the robot produce intelligence.

My robot doesn't use: planning programs/heuristic searches (used by MIT and Stanford University), Bayesian's probability theories for decision making, Bayesian's equation for induction and deduction, semantic networks for natural language understanding, predicate calculus, common sense systems, first-order logic, rule-based systems, genetic programming, or MACHINE LEARNING.