Move over C3PO, Cornell University computer science geeks have created a robot that can tell if you want a beer and pour it for you. Barristas also may want to wake up and smell the coffee too. This robot can guess whether students are hankering for java and pour it for them.
Kodiak the robot was as handy with a lager as with a latte, could open refrigerator and microwave doors and even tidy up, say the human robotics researchers. In tests, the hard-wired humanoid correctly anticipated a student’s next move between 57% and 82% of the time, depending on how far into the future it was “anticipating.”
Programmers broke down human movements, uses of objects, possible trajectories of motion and the intentions of activities, such as eating dinner or having a beer, said computer scientist Ashutosh Saxena, who works on personal robotics at Cornell. Along with graduate student Hema Koppula, Saxena built an algorithm around 120 videos of 10 common activities, giving the robot the flexibility to “rate” the next move in a sequence and move accordingly.
“You can think about human activities as a document in which there is a basic alphabet of what people can do, and we sequence things together to do long-term activities,” Saxena said. “We all do very basic things, like move our arms, get up, hold something, eat something or drink something. Now we can put this together in a sequence to do a variety of things.”
Read also:
Robot knows when to pour you a beer (CBS News)
Wish Granted: This Robot Knows When to Pour You a Brewski (TIME)
Robot predicts your actions – so it can help (or pour you a beer) (NBCNews.com (blog))
Explore: 49 additional articles.
From Our Sponsor
