Last time we saw DARPA’s Autonomous Robotic Manipulation testbed robot, it grabbed one of our cameras by the face. That was fun, but it’s not especially practical. Now, this—this is practical: using some low-cost (sub-$3,000) hands from iRobot and Sandia National Labs, the robot can now autonomously use tools to mostly change a car tire…
There are two things going on here that are worth getting excited about. Thing one is that the ARM robot is learning to work in unstructured environments, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s got a chance of being able to do stuff outside of the lab it was born in, potentially in either direct sunlight or partial shadow (but probably not both, let’s not get crazy here), and without the assistance of a Vicon motion-capture system. Thing two is that the robot is learning to deal with high-level commands, which is what it’s going to take for anybody who’s normal who isn’t a roboticist to get a robot to complex task. A high-level command is a command like “robot, change my tire” or “robot, clean my house” or “robot, get me a sandwich.”
via IEEE Spectrum
