Robot learns to play with Lego by watching human teachers

DAVID VOGT'S son loves Lego. As they played together one day, the robotics professor had an idea: could he teach a robot to put the blocks together? "We thought it would be funny to make a robot that could do the same thing I am doing with my son," says Vogt, who is at the Freiburg University of Mining and Technology in Germany. So Vogt and his colleagues brought an industrial robot arm to the lab. Like a child playing for the first time, the robot – equipped with a Kinect depth camera – observed two experienced humans wearing motion tracking tags as they built a Lego rocket.