Oh My! This Robot Can Actually Pair Socks!

It’s cute. It’s amazing. And it’s just where technology is taking us. Remember the Will Smith Movie ‘I, Robot’ that demonstrated how the world would be after a decade? That’s exactly where we are heading towards. A world where Robots would do our chores!

The initiative of teaching some household chores to robots was taken by the UC Berkeley researchers. Their first attempt was to teach the robot about folding laundry and now they have taught it to pair socks. Are you wowing right now? You should – that’s what I did too as soon as I saw the video. Honestly, life would become a lot easier if robots can do all the chores for us (except in the movie part where they betrayed humans).

In this Video…

In this video the robot called PR2 is given two socks. The robot is first trained on how to identify whether the sock is inside or outside. After determining the condition, the robot then flips the socks to an outside condition using a pole. The robot then recognizes if both the socks are good to go or not. If they are, it goes ahead and pairs them up.

Well the flipping is the part where I would want my robot (if ever I will have one) to be more productive and not to use a pole instead do the flipping job the way we do. I know that’s too much to demand as of now but that would be perfect, don’t you think? For now, I am good to go with the robot using that pole as long as it’s learning. And I am just praying that he is a good learner!

For the good learning skills of the robot and the good teaching skills of the researchers, the researchers have won $5000 from robot Willow Garage.  So I guess once again it’s time we should give a huge round of applause to the UC Berkeley researchers for their great efforts. And lastly, please keep praying for the good health and well-being of the PR2 robot. Wish him all the best for his schooling, after all it’s for our own sake.

Check out some more cool robots here: Gecko Robot, Hasbro’s New Masterpiece and Bionic Arm Mic Stand.

Via: Boing Boing