AI Learns How to Act Like a Dog

An interesting collaboration between the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for AI results in a project that aims to get AI to simulate a dog.  People, of course, wonder why dogs? It has to be more than the fact that they are cute, furry, and man’s best friend. Indeed it is! Dogs were chosen because they are smart.  They are smart and complex yet we don’t know what they are really thinking about. We may think we do (“My dog loves to play ball.” Does he really? Or is he just pleasing you?), but we really don’t.

As an initial foray into this line of research, the team wanted to see if by monitoring the dog closely and mapping its movements and actions to the environment it sees, they could create a system that accurately predicted those movements.

In order to do so, they loaded up a Malamute named Kelp M. Redmon with a basic suite of sensors. There’s a GoPro camera on Kelp’s head, six inertial measurement units (on the legs, tail and trunk) to tell where everything is, a microphone, and an Arduino that tied the data together.

They recorded many hours of activities — walking in various environments, fetching things, playing at a dog park, eating — syncing the dog’s movements to what it saw. The result is the Dataset of Ego-Centric Actions in a Dog Environment, or DECADE, which they used to train a new AI agent.

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