THE most popular event at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in Seattle at the end of May, was the Amazon Picking Challenge. Dozens of humanoid robots competed to move items ranging from rubber ducks to paperback books between shelves and a plastic bin, thus simulating the process of assembling an order at the retailer’s warehouse. An enthusiastic crowd of academics and roboticists gathered to applaud every success. In the event their cheers were few and far between. Many robots failed to grasp a single item. Even the winner picked just ten during its 20-minute test.
The problem is that although robots are good at precise, complex activities like welding a car, they are terrible at tasks humans find trivial, such as recognising objects and planning how to navigate or work around them. Building a robot that can move (slowly) through a home or workplace also requires lots of computing power, sophisticated actuators (a type of motor), a host of sensors and a hefty battery. Little surprise, then, that some of the robots in the Amazon competition cost as much as half a million dollars.
A more sensible solution, according to Walterio Mayol-Cuevas of the University of Bristol, in England, is to use people for navigation and planning and give robots the freedom to do what they do best. In a paper he presented at the conference, Dr...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1dh8U70
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