Robots Learning To Pick Things Up As Babies Do - Roboticmagazine

Babies learn about their world by pushing and poking objects, putting them in their mouths and throwing them. Carnegie Mellon University scientists are taking a similar approach to teach robots how to recognize and grasp objects around them. Manipulation remains a major challenge for robots and has become a bottleneck for many applications. But researchers at CMU's Robotics Institute have shown that by allowing robots to spend hundreds of hours poking, grabbing and otherwise physically interacting with a variety of objects, those robots can teach themselves how to pick up objects. In their latest findings, presented last fall at the European Conference on Computer Vision, they showed that robots gained a deeper visual understanding of objects when they were able to manipulate them.