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Robots get creative to cut through clutter
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed an algorithm to help mobile robots decide which objects need to be picked up and moved and which ones can be safely pushed aside to accomplish a task. Here, the algorithm enables a robot called HERB (for the Home Exploring Robot Butler) to pick up blocks.
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Clutter is a special challenge for robots, but new Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) software is helping robots cope, whether they're beating a path across the moon or grabbing a gallon of milk from the back of the refrigerator. CMU researchers developed an algorithm to help mobile robots decide which objects need to be picked up and moved and which ones can be safely pushed aside to accomplish a task. The software not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter, but it also surprisingly revealed the robot's creativity in solving problems.
"It was exploiting sort of superhuman capabilities," said Siddhartha Srinivasa, an associate professor of robotics, of his lab's two-armed, mobile robot called the Home Exploring Robot Butler, or HERB. "The robot's wrist has a 270-degree range, which led to behaviors we didn't expect. Sometimes, we're blinded by our own anthropomorphism."
In one case, the robot used the crook of its arm to cradle an object to be moved. "We never taught it that," Srinivasa added.
This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
To learn more, see the CMU news story Robots get creative to cut through clutter. (Date image taken: 2016; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Aug. 5, 2016)
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
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