As Ken Goldberg, director of the CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR) initiative, tells Wired magazine, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) — a new artificial intelligence technique that can use multiple 2D images of a scene to create a 3D graphical representation — “is ultra-hot,” with “hundreds of applications,” in fields ranging from entertainment to architecture to, of course, robotics.
In 2021, Goldberg and his colleagues used NeRF to help robots perceive transparent objects. He is currently applying this technique to help robots grasp unfamiliar shapes.