Here It Is, the Knife Robot

When you are teaching a robot, you could pretty much start with anything. So why not start by teaching the robot to pick up a knife? Depending on how terrified of a Skynet future you are, there are more than a few reasons to not. But that did not stop the researchers at the Human Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts from starting right there.

This demo, dug up by IEEE Spectrum and titled "Learning Interactions from Natural Language Instruction and Demonstration" pretty much speaks for itself. By using a string of simple commands ('grab,' 'find,' 'lift') the instructor is able to teach the robot more advanced commands that are comprised of the simpler instructions. The result is not only a robot with a knife, but a robot that knows how to find and grab a knife. Great!

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