Watch this robot cook shrimp and clean autonomously

The researchers taught the robot, called Mobile ALOHA (an acronym for "a low-cost open-source hardware teleoperation system for bimanual operation"), seven different tasks requiring a variety of mobility and dexterity skills, such as rinsing a pan or giving someone a high five. To teach the robot how to cook shrimp, for example, the researchers remotely operated it 20 times to get the shrimp into the plan, flip it, and then serve it. They did it slightly differently each time so the robot learned different ways to do the same task, says Zipeng Fu, a PhD Student at Stanford, who was project co-lead. The robot was then trained on these demonstrations, as well as other human-operated demonstrations for different types of tasks that have nothing to do with shrimp cooking, such as tearing off a paper towel or tape collected by an earlier ALOHA robot without wheels, says Chelsea Finn, an assistant professor at Stanford University, who was an advisor for the project. This "co-training" approach, in which new and old data are combined, helped Mobile ALOHA learn new jobs relatively quickly, compared with the usual approach of training AI systems on thousands if not millions of examples.