Robots Can Soon Make And Serve You Breakfast

Mimicking how our body works, scientists have been working on dual armed robots so that they can work just like humans.

The outcome was a robot which could perform breakfast-making duties in a more coherent way than when each part of it was being controlled individually.

By mimicking how humans use hands accurately, the skillset of these robots could expand exponentially. This could mean that soon robots can help us with our daily tasks, from opening a can to doing the laundry.

This phenomenon is referred to as the “gestalt” effect. This is used to call how arms and hands work together to do things that an individual limb can’t do on its own which include manual labor, tool use, communicative gestures, and meal preparation.

The main theory here is that we use specialized sections in our brain to do this. Daniel Ratika and his colleagues, the research’s authors were inspired by this when they created what is called “a bimanual action vocabulary” based on their analysis on extensive human bimanual arm and hand motions.

The experiment was carried out with a robot with a neural network similar to our brains and a bimanual action vocabulary linked to 24 volunteers. Each of these participants was equipped with motion capture gloves.

In 10 minutes, each person did 15 different motions that we normally do to make breakfast like cracking eggs or pouring juice. During this time, the humans’ poses were captured by the robot. After that, by search through its programmed bimanual vocabulary, the robot successfully re-enacted the motion.

The most important and surprising thing about this? The robot could override the motion commands of human independently and generate a sequence of movements to efficiently carry out the task.