‘Boris’ the robot can load up your dishwasher

‘Boris’ the robot was shown off at the British Science Festival today as an one of the first robots to be able to work out how to pick up unfamiliar objects in a human like fashion. Previously, robots could only pick up objects of a fixed size in a fixed location, however, Boris can intelligently work out how to pick up objects it has never been put in front of before.

The robot took 5 years and £350,000 to develop. Leader of the project Professor Jeremy Wyatt from the Birmingham University explained why learning how to load a dishwasher was its sole objective:

“The scenario that we’ve got is to get the robot to load a dishwasher. That’s not because I think that dishwasher-loading robots are an economic, social necessity right now. It’s because it encapsulates an incredibly hard range of general manipulation tasks,” he said.

“Once you can crack that, once you can manipulate an object that you’ve never seen before, you can do a whole bunch of different things.”

It comes with humanlike hands and aluminium arms and although loading a dishwasher may seem like a mundane challenge to accomplish, it opens up doors to uses in a broad range of areas in industry and other sectors like surgery. The robot can learn new grips and test out previously learned grips on familiar looking objects. Wyatt said ‘the robot comes up with about 1,000 different grasps in its head in about 10 seconds.’

[Image Courtesy of the Daily Mail]

It can intelligently work out how to grasp, whether to curl the fingers in a looping fashion, use them in a pinching manner, or to use the palm of the hand in a power-grip – each continually growing with variations as the robot learns from experience.

“The system we have developed allows the robot to assess the object and generate hundreds of different grasp options. That means the robot is able to make choices about the best grasp for the object it has been told to pick up, and it doesn’t have to be re-trained each time the object changes.”

Unfortunately it’s going to be a while before you have a robot at home loading your dishwasher. The team says the next big task on the adgenda is to get Boris to use both arms and transfer an object from one to the other.

“Being bi-manual is a real advantage for all sorts of purposes,” said Prof Wyatt, who hopes to see the robot stacking plates by next April.

Via: [BBC]