November 06, 2013 02:10pm ETRobot Cashier Learns to Handle Knives ... Safely Would you let a robot handle your groceries? Credit: YouTube, Cornell University View full size image

Before humans can trust robots to work as grocery store cashiers, these machines will have to prove they can do certain things — like not squishing our perfect heirloom tomatoes or stabbing us with new kitchen knives at the checkout line.

A group of researchers at Cornell University is teaching a robot dubbed Baxter how to handle, properly and safely, a variety of objects, from sharp knives to egg cartons, based on human feedback in a grocery-store scenario.

"We give the robot a lot of flexibility in learning," Ashutosh Saxena, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell, said in a statement. "The robot can learn from corrective human feedback in order to plan its actions that are suitable to the environment and the objects present."

For their experiments, Saxena and colleagues had a Baxter robot set up as a cashier in a mock checkout line. Baxter is a cheap, flexible robot built by a Boston-based startup called Rethink Robotics. It was primarily designed to work in assembly lines alongside people, but Baxter's learning skills also make it an easy-to-teach cashier.

As this video of the knife-wielding robot shows, the researchers are teaching Baxter how to handle different items by manually correcting Baxter's arm motions.

If the robot swings a sharp kitchen knife, for example, too close to the human playing customer at the checkout, a researcher could grab Baxter's arm and guide it in the right direction.

Over time the robot learns to associate different trajectories with different objects, such as a quick flip for a cereal box or a delicate lift for a carton of eggs, the researchers say.

Saxena and colleagues will present their work at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif., next month, but an early version of their research paper is available online.

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机器收银员学习安全处理刀具

Robot出纳学会处理刀... Safely 你能让一个机器人处理您的杂货？

之前，人类可以信任的机器人工作作为杂货店的收银员，这些机器必须证明他们能够做某些事＆mdash;不一样压扁了完美的传家宝西红柿或新菜刀刺向我们在收银台排队.

一组研究人员在康奈尔大学教戏称为百特公司如何处理，正确和安全，各种物体的机器人，从锋利的刀具以蛋箱的基础上，在一家杂货店店内情景.

u0026 QUOT人的反馈，我们给机器人很大的灵活性学习，与QUOT; Ashutosh说Saxena先生，计算机科学助理教授在康奈尔大学，在声明中说。 ＆QUOT;该机器人可以纠正人体的反馈学习，以规划自己的行动是适当的环境和现在的对象和QUOT;

对于他们的实验中，Saxena先生和他的同事有一个巴克斯特机器人设置为一个出纳一个模拟的收银台前排队。巴克斯特是由总部位于波士顿的启动所谓的反思机器人建立了一个便宜，灵活的机器人。它主要设计在旁边的人组装生产线的工作，但百特的学习能力也使它成为一个容易教收银员.

作为持刀机器人表演这段视频中，研究人员正在教巴克斯特如何处理不同的项目通过手动校正百特的手臂运动.

如果机器人摆动锋利的菜刀，例如，过于接近人打顾客在结账时，研究人员可以抓住百特的手臂，引导它朝着正确的方向.

随着时间的推移，机器人学会不同的轨迹与不同的对象，如快速翻转的麦片盒或精致生活的鸡蛋纸箱关联，研究人员说.

Saxena先生和他的同事将在神经信息处理展示自己的作品可用系统会议在太浩湖，加利福尼亚州，下个月，但他们的研究论文的早期版本的在线