European researchers designed a robot that can learn how to cook pizza by reading Wikihow instructions and watching Youtube videos in their aim to see if home robots could perform tasks for humans without to be particularly programmed for the respective tasks.
The robot dubbed by its creators PR2 is a cognition-enabled autonomous service bot that can teach itself to cook with the help of recipes found on the internet and videos on Youtube..
The robot is only one of several created by a multidisciplinary team of European researchers who work on a project to enable robots to perform competently everyday manipulation activities, both in human living and working environments.
The European research project has been launched in the year 2012 with funds from the EU initiative called the RoboHow project. Researchers from at least nine universities across Europe are participating in the ambitious project.
The team's ultimate goal is to create home and office robots able of performing tasks like cleaning and cooking for people. However, so far the team had focused on the task of teaching machines how to learn these activities first without being programmed for them but rather from instructions written in human language.
"Instead of programming a robot to perform precise movements, the goal is for a person to simply tell a robot what to do," According to paper published in the MIT Technology Review earlier this week, the researchers behind the RoboHow project want to teach robots how to perform precise movements and other specific knowledge "required to turn high-level instructions into specific actions".
Instead of programming them to perform these precise movements, the researchers want to teach robots in the same way as humans learn. RoboHow's machines have been gathering information from popular tutorial sites like WikiHow, for example. This is also the way how robots are learning how to cook, the same way as you and me. They are now cruising the internet for new recipes and watch Youtube video with detailed instructions on how to cook specific meals.
"Humans amass a certain amount of general knowledge from just getting on with their lives we don't need to be taught how to hold a spatula or a frying pan, as we've held similarly shaped objects before," According to the publication Quartz, this task of teaching robots in a human way is not so easy. While us humans, learn general information from just common sense and getting on with our lives, a robot, on the other hand, needs to be taught everything, from the scratch.
The online reaction to the new of self-learning chef robots shows that people are a bit stunned by the project, but the idea and the concept isn't entirely so surprising, given the fact that already many of our tasks are automated by machines.
