It doesn't look like they are using a classifier to do object recognition, although I confess I've never heard of the "sequential composition of cost funnels" the post is describing, neither do I claim to have understood it at any depth just from that post.
In any case, it does look like most of their AI (if you would even call it that) is hand-crafted. I understand that this is the done thing in robotics, in general.
Note also the various announcements by prominent deep learning groups, like DeepMind and OpenAI, about teaching robots, or robot hands, to manipulate various objects of limited shapes and forms. If deep learning and deep reinforcement learning was particularly successful in training robots to interact with real-world environments, you can bet you'd see a lot more announcements advertising this, with titles like "We taught a robot to peel potatoes using deep learning" etc.
It would be interesting to see if other machine learning techniques are often used with robotics. I am aware of one paper [1] that uses Inductive Logic Programming for robot vision, but robotics is really not my field so I'm probably missing lots of other work.
https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-learning-algorithms-are-u...
It doesn't look like they are using a classifier to do object recognition, although I confess I've never heard of the "sequential composition of cost funnels" the post is describing, neither do I claim to have understood it at any depth just from that post.
In any case, it does look like most of their AI (if you would even call it that) is hand-crafted. I understand that this is the done thing in robotics, in general.
Note also the various announcements by prominent deep learning groups, like DeepMind and OpenAI, about teaching robots, or robot hands, to manipulate various objects of limited shapes and forms. If deep learning and deep reinforcement learning was particularly successful in training robots to interact with real-world environments, you can bet you'd see a lot more announcements advertising this, with titles like "We taught a robot to peel potatoes using deep learning" etc.
It would be interesting to see if other machine learning techniques are often used with robotics. I am aware of one paper [1] that uses Inductive Logic Programming for robot vision, but robotics is really not my field so I'm probably missing lots of other work.
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[1] Meta-Interpretive Learning from noisy images
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/logvismlj.pdf
Full disclosure: one of the authors is my PhD advisor