Robots Can Now Play Jenga As Well As Humans Do

Up until now, Jenga has merely been a game for humans. But everything just has changed now. A group of researchers has successfully created robots that can play this game as well as we do.

You may not believe it, but Jenga requires more than a pair of hands, it's also about our sense of touch. We can play it very well just by looking at it and analyze the state of a Jenga tower visually.

According to the article published in Science Robotics, a group of researchers at MIT has built up a robot which is able to figure out how to play Jenga similar to how we play by depending on both sense of touch and visual analytical skill. For this particular robot, it senses the friction of a block by a pair of "fingers" and in terms of visual analyzing, it is provided with a camera that can see and examine the state of the Jenga tower so that it can move the right blocks without harming the balance, just like how we use our eyes.

The most noteworthy thing about this innovation is that this robot wasn't instructed to play the game explicitly. The bot learns everything all by itself, whether it is deciding which block to remove to how to place on top of other blocks without collapsing the structure. It is a try-and-learn process. After about 100 times of playing, it has discovered that moving a not-easy-to-move block can be damaging to the game's result.

What this research wants to point out isn't that now we can play Jenga with robots, but that we are now able to build robots that are more adaptable and multi-functional. Creating bots that are not only able to learn by itself but also can accomplish many different jobs altogether can be both economically beneficial and efficient for producing or simply helping with household chores.