Scientists are Creating Dog AI

Dogs may be our best friends, but they’re also our hard-working colleagues — tasked with everything from guarding our homes to guiding visually impaired people to sniffing out bombs. And now researchers have enlisted the help of an Alaskan Malamute named Kelp to develop an artificial intelligence system that thinks just like a dog, in hopes of creating canine-like robots.

To build a database of dog behavior, a team of scientists led by Kiana Ehsani, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, attached sensors to Kelp’s paws, torso, and tail to capture her movements for a couple of hours a day while eating, playing fetch, and walking around in various indoor and outdoor environments. A camera affixed to Kelp’s head recorded what she saw as she went about her everyday activities.

Over the course of several weeks, the researchers amassed more than 24,000 video frames — all associated with particular body movements.

The scientists then used machine learning to comb through the data and identify patterns in Kelp’s behavior. This was subsequently used to train an AI system to understand the behavior to a point where it could predict how Kelp — and dogs in general — might react under a variety of circumstances.

Ehsani and her colleagues found that the system could make accurate predictions, but only for relatively short time frames. For instance, the system could see a sequence of five images and then accurately predict Kelp’s next five movements.

But what surprised the researchers was what the system had learned from the dog beyond what it had been trained to predict.

The scientists found that the AI system could accurately identify “walkable” surfaces because Kelp intuitively knew if a path was too rocky, for instance, or if she wasn’t allowed there. The AI system could also distinguish between different environments — a park, a street, a stadium or an alleyway — based on the dog’s movement in those spaces.

By Denise Chow

Source: NBC Mach