Towards an Alchemy of Intelligence

There is a significant performance gap between human agents and robotic agents. Closing this gap has been the goal or robotics research for many years now. In this talk, I would like to speculate on desirable properties of solutions capable of closing that gap (as opposed to the development of increasingly competent skills that serve specific applications but do not achieve the generality required to be part of closing the gap). I will propose three such desirable properties and support my view with experiments from the areas of grasping, interactive perception, and learning from (inter-)action. As these experiments can only be considered circumstantial evidence for my claims, I prefer to refer to these properties as trips and tricks.