Have you ever found yourself in a situation similar to this: After a long, fun filled day at the beach, you finally sit down in your air conditioned living room in your usual spot on the couch and quickly chug down a cold one, only to realize that you need a refill and don’t want to move? Well I have, and while I admit I may have tried a couple of different options, including attempting to telepathically call the drink over my way, it seems as if I should have been spending my time creating a robot instead.
That is exactly what a group of researchers recently accomplished in Cornell’s Personal Robotics Lab. Leveraging both the widely popular gaming system, Microsoft Kinect’s 3D camera, as well as various 3D videos that are stored in its brain, the robot can actually figure out on its own when you’re ready for your next beer and the precise time to pour it to quench your thirst. No telling though if the robot knows that he should be pouring the beer at an angle to eliminate tons of foam.
Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of Computer Science and co-author of a new study related to the research explains, “We extract the general principles of how people behave. Drinking coffee (or another beverage) is a big activity, but there are several parts to it. The robot builds a ‘vocabulary’ of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities.”
Besides refilling your just emptied beer mug, the robot‘s abilities are somewhat limited. However, once it views an action, it will then store it in its memory, figure out how it can help you with whatever you are attempting to do and even use this data to help you much more easily eat, drink or even clean.
To get a better understanding of how the technological innovation works, watch the video below:
“What have the results been thus far?” lazy couch potatoes all over the world are asking. During multiple tests, the robot was able to predict what the human wanted or needed nearly 82 percent of the time when looking one second into the future, 71 percent correct for three seconds and 57 percent correct for 10 seconds.
If this exciting invention was ever released to the public, you can bet most of us wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway. And for people that can pay this large bill but live in small apartments comparable to shoe boxes in large cities, you’re out of luck as well, as this robot is pretty gigantic. For now at least, it looks like you will have to make your way to the kitchen every time you need something, that is, if you don’t have a sweet significant other ready, willing and able to help you.
