Some scientists involved with a new study from the Georgia
Institute of Technology are predicting that every home will have
a Jetsons-style "Rosie the robot" sometime by the end of the
next 10 years — and they went to work finding out how to get
those robots to learn from humans' commands. Today, knowledge of
robot programming is typically held only by computer science and
robotics experts. Non-programmers aren't usually very good at
teaching a robot because robots "learn" in ways different than
humans do. But soon, everyone will need to know how to talk to
robots, because it looks like they're going to be as common as a
household coffeemaker. To help robot builders learn to make
robots more responsive to human teaching methods, researchers at
Georgia Tech studied the types of questions usually asked by
humans. They documented the kinds of questions people asked into
three categories — label, demonstration and feature. Georgia
Tech offered an example of each: Label query — “Can I pour salt
like this?" Demonst