Sure, Babar was a pretty cool elephant, but what happens when he becomes a cyborg bent on the destruction of the mustache man who stole his crown in Babar Loses His Crown? He goes out and gets one of these robotic trunks and starts tearing stuff up around Paris. Pure insanity. Festo, a German robotics company, is making sure that Babar will be able to bring the hurt down on all of us with this… Read More
We humans enjoy not having knives inside of us. Robots don’t know this, three laws be damned. Therefore it’s important for humans to explain this information to robots using careful training. Thankfully, the good dudes at Cornell are on the case.
Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, and his team have created a system for fixing robotic motions. In their demo they show the robot lifting a knife from a counter and nearly stabbing a guy. The trainer explains that stabbing is not OK and the robot begins to learn through a process of trial and error that, in the end, ensures minimal stabbage. The system uses trajectory mapping (the robot decides on three potentially un-stabby motions) and the human selects the best one and moves the robot in order to ensure minimal stabbage. From the paper:
You can read their entire paper here or simply watch the amazing, non-stabbing robot below. Sadly, when the robots become TIDWRTWHUFOO we may not be so lucky – or unstabbed.
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