This article was published on October 1, 2016

Cross your fingers that this robot isn’t making breakfast tomorrow


Cross your fingers that this robot isn’t making breakfast tomorrow

Robots are capable of truly amazing things, and they’re getting more intelligent and functional by the day. Wait, that should have said ‘some’ robots… Some robots are capable of truly amazing things. This one? Well, this one is really only capable of making a mess.

In the video, Barret’s WAM robot is learning to flip pancakes through reinforcement learning. It’s the same way this robot learned to play ball in cup.

It was slow going at first. But eventually the robot got it. Granted, the video is six years old, but we’re still using the same training methods (mostly) today.

All told, it took 50 tries but that doesn’t really matter; breakfast is served.

Pretty good, right?

And, it’s at least twice as good at pancake flipping as this robot.

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