A HUMANOID robot called Draco 3 is being trained to do mundane tasks and could one day clean your dishes or cook for you at home.
The U.S. Sun took part in a training session demonstration for the robot at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
Professor Luis Sentis from the University of Texas, Austin led the session alongside three colleagues.
They revealed how teaching a humanoid can involve four methods.
The first is kinesthetic teaching, which involves touching the robot.
A second method involves teleoperating where a human is wearing tech that connects to the robot and shows it how to move.
Humanoids like Draco 3 can also learn through passive observation.
That means they use artificial intelligence to observe and learn an activity just like a child.
Last of the list is interactive demonstrations which also involve helping AI robots on their way to success.
The SXSW training session involved typing code into a computer to create a series of inputs that would then be uploaded to the humanoid.
It can then act on these inputs and do the task it’s been trained to do.
The researchers revealed that they’d like humanoids like Draco 3 to help at home and loom after the elderly.
Professor Sentis revealed how they could even help replace human jobs if populations start to dwindle.
“In Asia and Europe populations are decreasing very rapidly. I was born in Spain. We’re going to have half of the Spanish people in half a century.
“We’re now 50 but we’ll be 25 million,” he told a small audience.
Sentis explained that robots could also help care for an aging population when there are fewer young people.
“Robots becoming nursing support, I think that will be very important.”
Humanoids like Draco 3 may have great potential but that doesn’t mean the risk of a malfunction is zero.
When asked whether evil humanoids are a genuine concern, he simply replied, “Of course.”
Sentis is less concerned about home robots turning evil, but he did warn that having a large number of robots in the army could be a cause for concern.
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