The research could help improve the utility of robots in the home, allowing them to assist people with tasks like cooking and cleaning. Two robots successfully learned 12 tasks including opening a drawer, oven door and lid; taking a pot off the stove; and picking up a telephone, vegetable or can of soup.

“The robot can learn where and how humans interact with different objects through watching videos,” said Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science. “From this knowledge, we can train a model that enables two robots to complete similar tasks in varied environments.”

Current methods of training robots require either the manual demonstration of tasks by humans or extensive training in a simulated environment. Both are time consuming and prone to failure. Past research by Pathak and his students demonstrated a novel method in which robots learn from observing humans complete tasks. However, WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning, required the human to complete the task in the same environment as the robot.

Pathak’s latest work, Vision-Robotics Bridge, or VRB for short, builds on and improves WHIRL. The new model eliminates the necessity of human demonstrations as well as the need for the robot to operate within an identical environment. Like WHIRL, the robot still requires practice to master a task. The team’s research showed it can learn a new task in as little as 25 minutes.

“We were able to take robots around campus and do all sorts of tasks,” said Shikhar Bahl, a Ph.D. student in robotics. “Robots can use this model to curiously explore the world around them. Instead of just flailing its arms, a robot can be more direct with how it interacts.”

To teach the robot how to interact with an object, the team applied the concept of affordances. Affordances have their roots in psychology and refer to what an environment offers an individual. The concept has been extended to design and human-computer interaction to refer to potential actions perceived by an individual.

For VRB, affordances define where and how a robot might interact with an object based on human behavior. For example, as a robot watches a human open a drawer, it identifies the contact points — the handle — and the direction of the drawer’s movement — straight out from the starting location. After watching several videos of humans opening drawers, the robot can determine how to open any drawer.

The team used videos from large datasets such as Ego4D and Epic Kitchens. Ego4D has nearly 4,000 hours of egocentric videos of daily activities from across the world. Researchers at CMU helped collect some of these videos. Epic Kitchens features similar videos capturing cooking, cleaning and other kitchen tasks. Both datasets are intended to help train computer vision models.

“We are using these datasets in a new and different way,” Bahl said. “This work could enable robots to learn from the vast amount of internet and YouTube videos available.”

More information is available on the project’s website and in a paper presented in June at the Conference on Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Amid the Jovian system, Europa is of particular interest to scientists because of the strong evidence for nutrients, water and energy to potentially provide a habitable environment for some form of life beyond Earth. In addition, Europa is believed to be made up into four layers (from surface to center): an ice shell, salt water ocean, rocky mantle, and metallic core.

Like Earth, Europa’s ocean touches the rocky seafloor, which may allow for rock-water chemistry favorable for life. Some scientists also believe that the seafloor may host volcanoes, which can provide more energy and nutrients for a potential biosphere.

ASU scientists Kevin Trinh, Carver Bierson and Joe O’Rourke of the School of Earth and Space Exploration investigated the consequences of Europa forming with low initial temperatures, using computer code that Trinh wrote. Their findings have been recently published in Science Advances.

Hydrated rocks may be a key ingredient

Europa may have a metamorphic origin for the ocean. While some scientists speculated this, Trinh and his team show that if Europa indeed formed from hydrated rocks (i.e., rocks have hydrogen and oxygen), then enough of Europa’s interior should get hot enough to release water directly from the hydrated rocks to form the ocean and ice shell.

“The origin of Europa’s ocean is important because the moon’s potential to support life ultimately depends on the chemical ingredients and physical conditions during the ocean formation process,” said Kevin Trinh, graduate associate at ASU’s School Of Earth and Space Exploration.

Metallic core formation requires high temperatures

Many scientists studying this icy moon assumed that Europa formed with a metallic core during or shortly after accretion. This ASU study contradicts that prediction, instead arguing that Europa may not have started forming its metallic core until billions of years after accretion (if it happened at all).

“For most worlds in the solar system we tend to think of their internal structure as being set shortly after they finish forming. This work is very exciting because it reframes Europa as a world whose interior has been slowly evolving over its whole lifetime. This opens doors for future research to understand how these changes might be observed in the Europa we see today,” said Carver Bierson, postdoctoral research scholar at ASU’s School Of Earth and Space Exploration.

The existence of a metallic core is deeply tied to Europa’s internal heat, which may also be used to drive seafloor volcanism and contribute to a habitable seafloor environment. However, it is unclear whether Europa generated enough heat to form such a core. Trinh’s code calculates how heat is generated and distributed throughout a moon, which uses the same governing equations that many geodynamicists used for decades. The team’s novel result, however, comes from challenging the assumptions common to Europa modeling: A small moon like Europa could form as a cold mixture of ice, rock, and metal.

However, all of these processes require a hot interior. A small moon like Europa (~1% of Earth’s mass) may not have enough energy to trigger or sustain Earth-like processes — metallic core formation, seafloor volcanism, and ongoing rock-water geochemistry — which implies that Europa’s habitable potential is uncertain. The exact time at which Europa formed determines how much heat is available from the radioactive decay of a short-lived isotope of aluminum. Tidal heating (from gravitational interactions with Jupiter and other moons) also governs how quickly Europa’s interior separates into distinct layers.

Europa’s seafloor may be cool, hydrated, and experience limited (if any) seafloor volcanism

This study implies that there may be limited hydrothermal activity and seafloor volcanism at Europa, which may hinder habitability. However, confident predictions require more data.

“Europa is not just a wet, baby Earth. It is its own special world, full of mysteries to unravel,” said Joseph O’Rourke, Assistant Professor at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. In October 2024, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft called Europa Clipper, which should arrive at Europa in April 2030. With the recent work by Trinh, Bierson and O’Rourke, scientists will be better equipped to interpret incoming data from Europa Clipper, whose main objective is to evaluate Jupiter’s icy moon Europa for the potential conditions to host life.

Specifically, the investigators have improved understanding of the steps that lead to the production of IL-1 beta, a potent inflammatory protein signal released during many inflammatory responses.

“We now have a clearer understanding of the stepwise process that leads to the production of IL-1 beta,” said Andrea Wolf, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, and a senior and corresponding author on the new study. “By understanding the process, we hope to one day find a treatment for diseases associated with this inflammatory response.”

When the innate immune system — the defense system we were born with — identifies a potentially harmful bacterium, virus, or other external invader, it unleashes white blood cells to surround and attack the foreign agent. This can cause swelling, redness, heat and pain in the body’s tissues that — in a healthy body — eventually go away.

Some people, however, get stuck in the inflammation phase. This causes what is known as chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation can damage healthy cells in the body and is thought to lead to serious conditions like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and depression.

“Inflammation, in many instances, is vital to a thriving immune system and healthy body,” said David Underhill, PhD, chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Janis and William Wetsman Family Chair in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, who is also a senior and corresponding author on the study. “However, prolonged inflammation can wreak havoc on the body. This underscores the importance of understanding the cellular process of how inflammation is activated so we can work toward finding new treatments to curb chronic inflammation.”

The study published today is a follow-up to Cedars-Sinai research published in 2016 that explains how cells act to detect an infection. In that study, investigators discovered that an enzyme called hexokinase, typically used by cells to convert glucose into energy, has a second, inflammatory function. They discovered that hexokinase binds to a sugar from the cell wall of bacteria and activates the inflammasomes, leading to the production of IL-1 beta. Inflammasomes are receptors of the innate immune system that recognize microbes and tissue damage.

The current work presents a more complete picture of this process.

The investigators discovered that hexokinase leaves the mitochondria, the part of a cell that generates energy. This jump-starts an immune response: The release of hexokinase destabilizes the mitochondria and alerts the cell that something is wrong. This leads to clustering of a channel called VDAC in the membrane of the mitochondria, which interacts with another protein called NLRP3 to initiate inflammasome assembly. The inflammasomes then produce IL-1 beta, a driver of inflammation.

Investigators studied cells that were derived from laboratory mice to understand the steps involved in the IL-1 beta pathway. The team used substances called inhibitors that block cellular functions as well as gene-editing technology to turn off certain genes and the proteins they express. This allowed them to understand which proteins are vital to triggering inflammation.

Cedars-Sinai postdoctoral scientist Sung Hoon Baik, PhD, used the super-resolution microscope that is part of the Cedars-Sinai Biobank and Research Pathology Resource to visualize and measure the steps of this inflammatory process within individual cells.

“Being able to target specific steps in this pathwayis vital, because in addition to being important for inflammation, the components of this pathway also play a vital role in maintaining energy within the cell,” Wolf said. “We want to home in on its inflammatory role, not just turn it all off, because that would be bad for the cell.”

The investigators are continuing to study the cellular steps leading up to, and resulting from, hexokinase’s role in the activation of inflammasomes. They are also using the results from this study to begin to target this inflammatory pathway in different diseases.

Other Cedars-Sinai investigators who worked on the study include Courtney Becker, manager of the Underhill Laboratory at Cedars-Sinai; Sarah Fett, research associate at Cedars-Sinai; and V. Krishnan Ramanujan, PhD, research associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai and director of the Cedars-Sinai Biobank.

Funding: The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (award numbers R01AI148465, R01GM085796, R01AI071116).