Robot Learns to Pour Beer by Predicting Your Future

Have you ever dreamed of owning a personal robot servant to pour your beers for you? The idea is now one step closer to reality.

Researchers at Cornell University have programmed a robot that can predict what you’re about to do and offer up a helping hand. Using a Microsoft Kinect sensor, the robot watches your body movements. Then, it accesses a video database of about 120 household activities — ranging from putting food in the microwave, eating, brushing teeth, making cereal, and yes, pouring booze — to predict what your actions will be a few seconds into the future. The robot can then make a decision about what you’re likely to do next, and what it can do to assist you in that task.

This robot is an improvement over previous technologies, says Ashutosh Saxena, one of the computer scientists at Cornell who programmed the robot, because previous models were looking at what people were doing in the past.

“Looking a little bit into the future helps a lot,” he says. While you can’t order this robot from Amazon yet, the code underlying the ‘bot’s predictive powers is available under an open source license. Some developers have already downloaded the code and asked how they could take it further, Saxena says. “The code is ready to go,” he says. Read more >>

Robots to Care for Aging Mom and Dad

In the opening scene of the movie “Robot & Frank,” which takes place in the near future, Frank, an elderly man who lives alone, is arguing with his son about going to a medical center for Alzheimer’s treatment when the son interrupts him. “I brought you something,” he says to Frank. Then the son pulls a large, white humanoid robot from the trunk of his car.

Frank watches in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me,” he says as a robot helper, called the VGC-60L, stands in front of him. “I’m not this pathetic!”

But as Frank soon learns, he doesn’t have much of a choice. His new robot helper is there to cook, clean, garden and keep him company. His son, mired in family and work life, is too busy to care for his ailing father.

Just like Frank, as the baby boomer generation grows old and if the number of elderly care workers fails to grow with it, many people might end up being cared for by robots. According to the Health and Human Services Department, there will be 72.1 million Americans over the age of 65 by 2030, which is nearly double the number today.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country will need 70 percent more home aide jobs by 2020, long before that bubble of retirees. But filling those jobs is proving to be difficult because the salaries are low. In many states, in-home aides make an average of $20,820 annually. Read more >>