Japanese scientists in Hasegawa Lab of the Tokyo Institute of Technology have built a robot that is capable of thinking, learning and having human reactions.
The robot has been designed based on "unsupervised learning mechanism” called Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN) and enables the robot to estimate future patterns and networks, PC magazine reports. Unlike the robots that have been developed under controlled situation, this new generation of robot only remembers basic knowledge and apply them to its immediate situation.
While previous productions, including industrial robots, were capable of doing tasks quickly and accurately, they were unable to react to slight changes in the environment, explains a researcher.
Future applications are endless, especially since SOINN allows robots to learn from sources like the Internet and other robots.
In a demo, scientists show the robot successfully identifying items on a table and describing what should be done with them; for instance it successfully pours a cup of water, sets it down on a coaster, and then adds a block of ice.
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