Robots Have Started Teaching Other Robots New Skills

In an important advance that takes us one step closer to the inevitable robopocalypse, MIT researchers have developed a system that teaches robots how to acquire new skills--and then teach those skills to different types of robots. The system is called C-LEARN, and it was developed by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Using C-LEARN, people who have no experience with computer programming can teach a robot how to perform a task--like dropping a flask into a bucket, or pulling a rod from a container--by providing it with some basic rules about the task, and allowing the robot to view a single demonstration of the task being completed. Incredibly, a robot can then transfer this newly-acquired knowledge to another robot, even if the robot learning is physically different than the robot teaching. Eventually, the C-LEARN system could allow factories to utilize a host of different robot types, and not have to worry about programming each and every one of them individually.