Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Robot that opens the door and cleans the kitchen

Imagine a robot that has an arm and hand. It grabs the handle of a door knob, turns it and open the the door. Then the robot moves quickly into the door. Watching this makes me feel something surreal. This action feels remarkably like a human. It is a little scary to see how far a robot has come. Check out this video from Andrew Ng's group:

The ability to grasp objects indicates that robotics has come a long way from its early days. It is triumph of both computer vision and the mechanical engineering of robot arms.

The kitchen clean robot uses the same grasping ability to put away plates. The group Readybot created this prototype:

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