If you find doing the
laundry boring, a robot can soon
come to your rescue. An Indian-
origin scientist has developed an
automated tool that is capable of
doing laundry without any specific
knowledge of what it has to wash.
The researches enabled the robot to
do the laundry without knowing how
many and what type of clothes
needed to be washed.
"The widely imagined helper robots
of the future are expected to 'clear
the table,' 'do laundry' or perform
day-to-day tasks with ease," said
Siddharth Srivastava, a scientist at
the United Technologies Research
Center, Berkeley.
The researchers' key insight was to
use human behaviour -- the almost
unconscious action of pulling,
stuffing, folding and piling -- as a
template, adapting both the
repetitive and thoughtful aspects of
human problem-solving to handle
uncertainty in their computed
solutions.
Out of the 13 or so tasks involved in
the laundry problem, the team's
system was able to complete more
than half of them autonomously and
nearly completed the rest -- by far
the most effective demonstration of
laundering for artificial intelligence
(AI) to date, the researchers noted.
The framework that Srivastava and
his team developed combines
several popular planning paradigms
that have been developed in the past
using complex control structures
such as loops and branches and
optimizes them to run efficiently on
modern hardware.
Indian-origin scientist develops robot that can do laundry-TechNews - IBNLive Mobile
