An easier way to teach robots new skills

MIT researchers have developed a system that enables a robot to learn a new pick-and-place task based on only a handful of human examples. This could allow a human to reprogram a robot to grasp never-before-seen objects, presented in random poses, in about 15 minutes. With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down. Reprogramming that robot involves hand-labeling thousands of images that show it how to grasp these new mugs, then training the system all over again.