[Tyler]

Robots Move from Pancakes to Whiteboards
     


Remember that pancake
flipping robot we posted about last year? The same researchers are
still investigating upper-body kinesthetic teaching in robots and a
reader let us know about the latest results:
The team of researchers from Italy
and Japan, lead by Dr. Petar
Kormushev, has taught a Japanese humanoid robot how to clean a
whiteboard. The approach that the team developed is called "upper-body
kinesthetic teaching", and can be applied to a wide variety of vertical
surface related tasks, such as window cleaning, wall painting, wallpaper
fitting, drawing on a wall, etc.

The new research will be presented at the upcoming International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May of 2011 in Shanghai,
China. If you just can't wait to read the research, you're in luck
because the paper is already online: Upper-body
Kinesthetic Teaching of a Free-standing Humanoid Robot (PDF format).
   

http://robots.net/article/3107.html