Many robots today are able to follow verbal instructions. However, the robot first has to be programmed with software code that allows it to respond to those instructions in some predetermined way, and that software must be added to every time the robot’s task list is enhanced. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just avoid all that messy fiddling about with software and talk to a machine as we would a human and explain what we wanted it to do? Researchers at Cornell University thought so, that’s why they designed and built a learning robot as part of their “Tell me Dave” project.
Based on Willow Garage’s PR2 robot, the Tell me Dave robot follows on from previous research at Cornell that includes teaching robots to identify people’s activities by observing their movements, identifying objects and situations in an environment and responding accordingly based on previous experience, and using visual and non-visual data to refine a robot’s understanding of objects.
via Gizmag
