Artificial intelligence is ubiquitous these days and is helping human beings in every sphere of life. India is slowly progressing in the field of artificial intelligence and education is the latest sector which has seen the rise of AI. Continuing the trend, a Bengaluru-based school has deployed humanoid robots to deliver lectures. Indus International School in Bengaluru has introduced three humanoid robots for teaching students of class 7,8 and 9 with the ultimate aim of replacing human teachers altogether. These human-looking robots are capable of two-way interaction i.e. they can answer queries of students and respond to their answers similar to how voice-based assistants work.

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In an era of heightened fears about killer robots, teaching them martial arts may seem unwise. But researchers have now shown a robot how to flip nunchucks to demonstrate an intuitive approach for teaching complex manual tasks. The group built a bionic hand and a motion-capture glove that can be used to teach the robot by demonstration, a popular method for skills requiring dexterity. But that's like learning from a silent teacher, the engineers say in research uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, so they devised an approach closer to how humans are taught. First, the teacher explains each step of the trick using an intuitive symbolic flow chart called a Petri net.

Science is exciting in theory, but it can also be dreadfully dull. Some experiments require hundreds or thousands of repetitions or trials -- an excellent opportunity to automate. That's just what MIT scientists have done, creating a robot that performs a certain experiment, observes the results, and plans a follow-up… and has now done so 100,000 times in the year it's been operating. The field of fluid dynamics involves a lot of complex and unpredictable forces, and sometimes the best way to understand them is to repeat things over and over until patterns emerge. One of the observations that needs to be performed is of "vortex-induced vibration," a kind of disturbance that matters a lot to designing ships that travel through water efficiently.

She and her students have also programmed a TurtleBot they call Resolution Bot, a play on the New Year's resolution because it acts as a health coach. At the beginning of the year, the robot visited professors and students to ask how they were feeling. The robot would then count out exercises for the person to do, such as push-ups, or go on a walk with the person. The robot also carried bananas and other healthy snacks to offer the people. The robot was remote controlled by students, who developed ways to animate the robot more, such as having the robot nod when it counted out exercises or move toward the person if they put their hand up for a high five.