Teaching robots lateral thinking
Many commercial robotic arms perform what roboticists call “pick and place” tasks: The arm picks up an object in one location and places it in another. Usually, the objects — say, automobile components along an assembly line — are positioned so that the arm can easily grasp them; the appendage that does the grasping may even be tailored to the objects’ shape.General-purpose household robots, however, would have to be able to manipulate objects of any shape, left in any location. And today, commercially available robots don’t have anything like the dexterity of the human hand.At this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, students in the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present a pair of papers showing how household robots could use a little lateral thinking to compensate for their physical shortcomings.One of the papers concentrates on picking, the other...