Robot Learns to Sort and Organize After Watching a Human Do It Only Once

Having a robotic butler hand you a steaming cup of coffee and the newspaper in the morning is something science fiction has made us yearn for and modern robotics has brought into the realm of possibility. Yet roboticists are still having trouble teaching machines how to complete tasks that even children are capable of. That's why two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have begun teaching a robot as if it were a five-year-old in the hopes of turning them into the taskmaster robots of the silver screen. "We're teaching robots how to pull off sorting and organizational tasks by simply watching a human do them once," Tianhe Yu co-author of the study tells Inverse. "Today's robots are able to perform a few specific tasks well, but they still don't come close to what a human is capable of. We hope that by teaching robots through demonstration we can enable them to carry out more general tasks."