AI claims another job: robot choreographer

The rise of robot-driven industrial sites has put increasing emphasis on the need to choreograph the machines to work in tandem without accidents on busy assembly lines.

However, the complex job has depended largely upon manual inputs by trained human programmers – a lengthy and tedious task that is also error-prone.

Now, scientists from UCL, Google DeepMind and Intrinsic state they have developed an AI algorithm that can more quickly and precisely complete the task.

Dubbed RoboBallet, the algorithm employs reinforcement learning to train a neural network robot brain, with ascending rewards for task completion and speed.

Lead author Matthew Lai, a PhD researcher at UCL Computer Science and Google DeepMind, said: “RoboBallet transforms industrial robotics into a choreographed dance, where each arm moves with precision, purpose, and awareness of its teammates. It’s not just about avoiding crashes; it’s about achieving harmony at scale. 

“For the first time, we can automate complex multi-robot planning with the grace and speed of a dance, making factories more adaptive, efficient, and intelligent.”

The graph neural network works with data in a graph form. Its use enables robots to understand and reason about their surroundings (treating obstacles like a point in a network) so they arrive at the most effective way to work together.  

During the research proicess, after several days training, RoboBallet generated plans in seconds – even for complex layouts it had not viewed previously, solving up to 40 tasks employing eight robotic arms.

Creators say its speed of action permits a factory to adapt almost instantly to avoid the usual downtime that undermines productivity.

It also significantly increases the number of robots able to be choreographed, addressing another key industrial concern, scalability. Thanks to the system’s graph-based architecture, it can learn principles of coordination rather than relying upon memorising particular scenarios, say the scientists.

Co-author Alex Li, an associate professor at UCL computer science department, said: “In today’s factories, coordinating multiple robotic arms is like solving a moving 3D puzzle, every action must be perfectly timed and placed to avoid collisions. Right now, this planning takes specialists hundreds of hours and is costly to design manually.

“The name, RoboBallet, captures the elegance and what we can do with so many robots. Just as ballet dancers move in perfect harmony with each other, our robots can now coordinate their movements with a superhuman level of precision and grace.”

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