New system allows robots to follow orders

MIT sciencists, including those of Indian origin, have developed a new system that allows robots to understand voice commands just like artificial intelligence (AI) assistants such as Siri and Alexa. Currently robots are very limited in what they can do. Their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.

For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox and ask a robot to “pick it up,” it would be completely lost. Picking it up means being able to see and identify objects, understand commands, recognise that the “it” in question is the tool you put down, go back in time to remember the moment when you put down the tool, and distinguish the tool you put down from other ones of similar shapes and sizes.
Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have gotten closer to making this type of request easier.

They have developed an Alexa-like system “ComText” – for “commands in context” – that allows robots to understand a wide range of commands that require contextual knowledge about objects and their environments. “Where humans understand the world as a collection of objects and people and abstract concepts, machines view …read more