An easier way to teach robots new skills

With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. But a new technique developed by MIT researchers would require only a handful of human demonstrations to reprogram the robot. The technique uses a neural network specifically designed to reconstruct the shapes of 3D objects. The researchers use this trained NDF model to teach a robot a new skill with only a few physical examples. "How efficiently we can teach robots new manipulation skills depends on the robots' ability to generalize from just a few demonstrations.