Watch a robot peel a banana without crushing it into oblivion

A robot trained by machine learning that imitates a human demonstrator can successfully peel a banana without smashing it to smithereens. Handling soft fruit is a challenge for robots, which often lack the dexterity and nuanced touch to process items without destroying them. The uneven shape of fruit – which can vary significantly even with the same type of fruit – can also flummox the computer-vision algorithms that often act as the brains of such robots. Heecheol Kim at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues have developed a machine-learning system that powers a robot, which has two arms and hands that grasp between two "fingers". First, a human operating the robot peeled hundreds of bananas, creating 811 minutes of demonstration data to train the robot to do it by itself.