Peeling a banana is an effortless task for us humans. The same could not be said for robots, however. These machines find manipulating deformable objects problematic, as this activity requires knowledge of the type of force and dexterity needed. There is a solution to this, though, and that is by using human demonstration data. This group of researchers from the University of Tokyo did just that.
After feeding the robot with the said data, it was able to pick up a banana from a table and peel it successfully, all in less than three minutes — a fast time for a robot.
But there is one problem with this system. It needs "quite a lot of expensive GPUs." Nevertheless, it will be a useful system. Not just in peeling bananas but in other activities that require fine motor skills.
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