Robots are gradually beginning to taking over all our boring and mundane chores. Already our metal assistants have been taught to flip pancakes and shoot arrows. People at Fujitsu recently released video footage of them teaching a robot how to erase a whiteboard.
Dr. Petar Kormushev decided to instruct his robot in a new skill that could come in handy at your next meeting. Dr. Kormushev, working with a team from the Italian Institute of Technology and Tokyo City University used a technique called “upper-body kinesthetic teaching,” to help this Fujitsu HOAP-2 humanoid robot learn the appropriate manoeuvres to clean the marker-covered whiteboard surface.
Humanoid robot learns to clean a whiteboard
While the robot is too short to be of any use when the whiteboard is hanging from the wall, the video is proof of concept that we can teach it to learn things, and this is only the beginning. There is a variety of applications this technique can be put to like robots being used to drive vehicles, to pick up litter or even to wash windows in the future? Now we just have to make sure they don’t learn to rebel against us humans!