WIREDGOV

It's EU Robotics Week time again. For the third consecutive year, the achievements of Europe's researchers and inventors working in robotics are celebrated in over 300 events from November 25th to December 1st. Here are some examples of the best EU-funded Robotics projects.

RoboHow – Can a robot learn to make pancakes on its own?

A robot that can make pancakes doesn't seem different from a bread machine. But, a robot that has learnt by itself to make pancakes, fold laundry, throw away garbage and do other everyday activities around the house is entirely different.

The project enables robots to learn on their own how to carry out tasks in human working and living environments by finding instructions online or by observing humans doing them. The goal is to develop robots that can help people in everyday activities, as well as to find out to what extent a robot can learn by itself. Robohow allows robots to load the instructions they receive into their knowledge base. However, a lot of information is still missing, so these instructions are combined with information from videos showing humans perform the tasks in question and from kinaesthetic teaching and imitation learning. The project is led by Universität Bremen, with the participation of researchers from France, Sweden, Belgium, The Netherlands, Greece, Germany and Switzerland. See the video & the website.

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