An important human ability, one of reading and interpreting text has been successfully replicated in a robot named Marge. Her creators are Ingmar Posner and Paul Newman at the University of Oxford, along with their collaborator Peter Corke at Queensland University of Technology. Marge is able to determine what a word says and what it means, effectively making an artificial intuitive leap.
"Text spotting is hard because text is such a variable thing," said Newman. "It appears in so many guises in so many places, in so many sizes, and of course the real world is full of reflections, occlusions, etc."
With the highly adaptive and logically inclined brains we humans have, reading is a simple matter for any literate human. Even if a word size or the lighting in the room changes, a literate human can still read. That's because the human brain can make intuitive leaps of logic, said Edward Grant, Director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at North Carolina State University.
"The brain says, 'I've done something kinda like this before, so I can adapt to this new activity that has been presented to me,'" said Grant.
A robot, or more specifically, the mathematical algorithms installed on a robot that are its brain, can't make that intuitive leap. For a robot, a change in the angle, lighting or size means they have to learn to read all over again, said Grant.
Because of this limitation, a reading robot ("or 'robot literacy,' as we have come to think of it," said Posner) is usually found in the lab, where the light, the angle, and other variables remain constant and unchanging, so as to prevent the robot from getting confused.
But in a move both simple and brilliant, the Oxford scientists installed text recognition software (technically called Optical Character Recognition, or OCR), complete with spell-checker and dictionary, onto Marge, a small robot on wheels. By using a few new tricks to separate text from, say, sticks or trash, and correcting the image based on a simple spell-check and the word's meaning in the dictionary, Marge can bridge the gap in intuition.
Marge is actually pretty smart, she can find and correct misspelled words. She taught herself that Barclays is a bank, Strada is a restaurant, and that both are in the UK. She can also read the New York Times and the BBC Online. And soon she will take her first steps, or more accurately, her first rotations, into the real world.
Her creators hope that Marge, and her future versions will be able to navigate through the real world using the same words and phrases that humans use.
"On the one hand it makes perfect sense," said Gregory Dudek, a scientist at the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University. "The environment has markings for people to use, and this exploits those human markings for use in a robot."
Robots come in myriad shapes and sizes, from Google's self-driving cars to toys for children. This advance could enable car navigation systems that don't rely exclusively on GPS, or a robot could even lead a person to that perfect gift in the mall. The Oxford group already has newer version of Marge, dubbed Lisa that they are also testing.
Since Marge's intelligence comes from software, not hardware, that means that it could be used in devices besides robots as well, said Dudek. Cell phones and even eyewear (equipped with some kind of head-mounted display) could eventually read signs or menus and instantly provide information to the user.
There is still a lot of work to do before Marge's technological children, including Lisa, could live on your phone. But the day is not very far away for sure.