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Robot Learns to Clean Whiteboard, Schoolchildren Rejoice

Robots may steal our jobs, and apparently, our kids's jobs too, as Fujitsu's HOAP robot learns to clean a whiteboard

1 min read
Robot Learns to Clean Whiteboard, Schoolchildren Rejoice

This is HOAP-2, and it likes to clean. It doesn't really know how to clean, but that's okay, because it does know how to learn. A human can move HOAP-2's arms in different cleaning patterns, and the bot will remember and then be able to clean by itself later on. Take a look:

The cool thing here is, of course, that HOAP is learning to erase instead of being programmed to erase. Robot learning is the focus of tons of research today. Now, in the case of HOAP, some people would argue that this is a waste of time, because robots should be able to detect marks on a whiteboard and erase them autonomously. And that's true, but it's also not the point.

If you're a teacher with a bunch of dirty whiteboards and no naughty kids and someone hands you a robot, you don't want to have to worry about whether your whiteboards are the right shade of white or the right size or whatever... And what if you have chalkboards instead? It really makes much more sense to have a robot be a generalist, and to be an effective generalist a robot has to be adaptable, something that (for now at least) robots are notoriously bad at. But robots are notoriously good at following instructions, so robots that can learn new tasks from humans on the fly have the potential to be much more effective, and much less frustrating for their users.

[ Petar Kormushev ]

Thanks Tipper!

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