Teaching robots through trial and error

A few days after watching a small army of Sawyer robots drop fake apples into plastic bowls, we're back at UC Berkeley's Sutardja Dai Hall to witness another approach to robotic learning. The UCB research team has deemed the robot BRETT -- that's the Berkeley Robot for Elimination of Tedious Tasks. Like the Sawyer robots, BRETT is here to learn -- and hopefully offer researchers some valuable insight into how we can teach robots how to perform dull and repetitive tasks without a lot of programming. In this case, the job is picking and placing -- a decidedly tedious warehouse task that has become extremely demanding as online retailers like Amazon have put the crunch on logistics companies. In some scenarios, robots are taught to execute the process through human demonstrations.