Indian-Origin Scientist Made A Robot That Can Learn New Skills By Observing Humans

Robots can be of tremendous help with chores in restaurants and around the house but one of their most significant setbacks is that most humanoids can only do what they are programmed to do.

However, a recent creation of an Indian-origin scientist at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has proven that robots can learn new skills just by observing humans.

The new system equipped robots with panning ability like the one found on humans with which the humanoids must consider all the conditions to reach a goal.

One particular task is to set up a dining table. The researchers made a dataset with the ways eight common objects a dinner plate, bowl, mug, spoon, small plate, glass, knife, and fork in several configurations.

The robots then observe human’s demonstration of table setting with the said objects before attempting on its own. Challenges are added to make matter more difficult for the robots. Items can be removed, hidden, or stacked.

What the robots can do is outstanding. In multiple real-world experiments, they made no mistakes at all. And the number of fail attempts is just a few among thousands of test runs.

The real-world applications of the robots are plenty. Workers can teach them to do tasks on the assembly line. People can train them to do housework like setting up table or load the dishwashers in the way they want.

Mr. Shah said that the next step for the team is to train the robots to modify its actions based on verbal feedbacks. So in the future, you can say things like place the fork before the knife to tell the humanoids what you want them to do.

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