MIT Researcher Teaches Robots To Adapt

 Robotics  

MIT Researcher Annie Holladay has taught her PR2 robot to use both hands when dealing with complicated objects.  Such advanced robotic programming will be necessary if we are ever to have household robots.

Most commercial robotic arms perform what roboticists call "pick and place" tasks: The arm picks up an object in one location and places it in another. General-purpose household robots, however, would have to be able to manipulate objects of any shape, left in any location. Today, commercially available robots don't have anything like the dexterity of the human hand.

At this year's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the premier robotics conference, students in the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present a pair of papers showing how household robots could use a little lateral thinking to compensate for their physical shortcomings.

In the video above, MIT senior Annie Holladay demonstrate and describe how her algorithm helps the Willow Garage PR2 robot adapt by using both of its arms instead of just one.




SOURCE  MIT News Office

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