Robots can learn to hold knives Humans, most of us anyway, can move a coffee cup without spilling the liquid inside. But such delicate tasks — how to balance a plateful of food, or how to place an egg crate in the fridge without smashing the contents — are, bizarrely, hard lessons to teach a robot. Today, most robots learn their moves from experts. They can be commanded by pre-written programming — which may not be universal for all actions — or trained to copy movements after watching precise expert demonstrations. A new training technique being perfected at Cornell University will let regular humans easily train household robots to perform delicate or dangerous tasks by simply guiding their arms. Recently, the researchers trained a robot as a checkout clerk, and taught it not to harm a person standing nearby when it rang up a pointy object, a knife.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:38:06 +0000
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