Robot Learns Like A Child

Robots are notoriously lousy at coping with unfamiliar situations. One of the major obstacles to having robots assist us at home is that they’re going to need to be flexible, and home users aren’t going to want to sit down and write a new servo control subroutine every time their robot needs to perform a task for which it has not been preprogrammed. The robot in the video above is able to learn via observation and replication, which is how we humans figure things out. The HOAP-3 robot, made by Fujitsu, has been programmed by Sylvain Calinon and other researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to watch how a human performs an action, and then duplicate that action. If the robot doesn’t get it right, it can learn on the fly as a human corrects its motions, which (if you think about it) is pretty much how you were taught to write, throw a baseball, ride a bike, and so forth. I’d much rather have a dumb robot with the ability to learn than a smart robot that I can’t teach new things to, especially if the teaching process is no more complicated than a game of Simon says. Er, make that Evan says.

[ Sylvain Calinon’s Homepage ]