Robots have always been the topic of discussion for most science fiction enthusiasts. Sci-fi fans love to imagine a world that is dominated by bots.
They love to imagine a world in which robots do everything that is conceivable including being companions to human beings. While we still have not reached that stage apart from a few tardy robotic pets found in Japan, the technology itself is growing at an amazing pace. For instance, the Technical University of Munich is the site of some very interesting developments. The researchers there have built James and Rosie, a robotic couple that are already well known for baking pancakes and sausages for breakfast. This time around, the robotic couple have intuitively learned to make popcorn on their own.
This means that they do not need to be told each and every step of making popcorn and sandwiches. They just know that the stove needs to be turned on to make popcorn and all the localization, navigation and manipulation of stove controls too are handled by the robots themselves without being told. Usually, robots need to be ‘taught’ or ‘told’ with the help of software what they need to do, with each step broken down into actions.
Thanks to this new research development, scientists are able to let the robots do things which haven’t been explicitly stated to them. This means that in the future you could just ask a robot to ‘make a sandwich’ or ‘get some popcorn’. In response to these imperatives, the robot could go to the kitchen, turn on the stove, heat the bread, chop the vegetables and make a sandwich. It could also make popcorn in a similar way.
The idea of this research is to explore the possibilities of robots being able to do certain things on their own without being told or programmed to do something step by step. You could also take a look at the Kinect-controlled Robot and the Rubik’s Cube Solving Robot, both of which are examples of what bots can already do.
