This Robot Can Read Your Mind - Mashable

What's This? By Stan Schroeder2013-05-29 12:00:52 UTC Have you ever had a thirst for a cold beverage, and wished it would just magically appear in your hands? It might just happen in the near future, as researchers at Cornell University have developed a robot which can predict what you want to do next. The mind-reading robot — a PR2 personal robot designed by Willow Garage, equipped with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera — does that by analyzing your body movements. It then searches through its database of various household activities and decides which action will likely follow. Let's say you're done with your lunch and you want to place the leftovers into the fridge. The robot sees that you're picking up a container with food and proceeds to open the fridge for you, as that action is very likely to happen next. The robot could also pour your beer or coffee, put the dirty dishes away as well as a number of other menial tasks. "We extract the general principles of how people behave. Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it," said Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research. Scientists from Cornell claim the robot made correct predictions 82% of the time when looking one second into the future, 71% for three seconds and 57% for 10 seconds. According to Saxena, the next step is improving on robot's reactions to the predictions. "The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action. Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond," he said. Image courtesy of Cornell University/YouTube Topics: Gadgets, mind-reading robot, Robot, Tech via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNG0kq_jNfYASKPqsdGXLVPhMK0eEw&url=http://mashable.com/2013/05/29/this-robot-can-read-your-mind/

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