In the video below, a robot called iCub demonstrates some
impressive archery skills. What’s remarkable about the robot
isn’t just its headdress, but how it learns over time to improve
its aim until it’s able to hit the bull’s-eye. Researchers at
the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova taught the
robot how to hold the bow and fire the arrow. A learning
algorithm, dubbed “archer” (Augmented Reward Chained Regression)
then used visual feedback to gradually improve the robot’s aim.
iCub was developed by a consortium of about a dozen European
universities with the goal of mimicking and understanding
cognition and learning abilities through interactions with the
environment. The robot, which has visual and physical sensors,
is designed to resemble a 3-year-old-child and mimic methods of
learning. The team will present their findings with the archery
learning algorithm at the Humanoids 2010 conference in December.
Smaller design teams can now prototype and deploy faster.