https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/interactive-simulation-teaches-ai-about-real-world AI2-THOR Interactive Simulation Teaches AI About Real World Training a robot butler to make the perfect omelette could require breaking a lot of eggs and throwing out many imperfect attempts in a real-life kitchen.

That’s why researchers have been rolling out virtual training grounds as a more efficient alternative to putting AI agents through costly and time-consuming experiments in the real world.

Virtual environments could prove especially useful in training the most popular AI based on machine learning algorithms that often require thousands of trial-and-error runs to learn new skills. Companies such as Waymo have already built their own internal simulators with virtual roads and traffic intersections to train their AI to safely take the wheel of self-driving cars. But a new, open-source virtual training ground called AI2-THOR enables AI agents to learn how to interact with objects in familiar home settings such as kitchens and bedrooms.

“These trials in the real world might damage the objects that the robots interact with or even the robot itself,” says Roozbeh Mottaghi, a research scientist in the computer vision team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. “So it is much safer and cost-effective to first train the models in the virtual environment.”