They will be able to conquer the world and rule the human race, but first, they need to learn how to peel bananas. Robots in Japanese factories are now carrying out simple tasks or delivering food to restaurant patrons. Researchers have now unveiled a robot capable of executing the delicate task of peeling a banana without squashing the fruit inside.
While the dual-armed machine is only successful 57% of the time, banana peeling points to a future where machines undertake more subtle operations than moving metal parts or delivering coffee.
Video from researchers at the University of Tokyo showed the robot picking up and peeling a banana with both hands in about three minutes.
Researchers Heecheol Kim, Yoshiyuki Ohmura and Yasuo Kuniyoshi trained the robot using a "deep imitation learning" process where they demonstrated the banana-peeling action hundreds of times to produce sufficient data for the robot to learn the actions and replicate them.
In this case, the banana reached its success rate after more than 13 hours of training.
While still undergoing more testing, Kuniyoshi believes his robot training method can teach robots to do different simple "human" tasks.
He hopes the better-trained robots can alleviate Japan's labor shortage problems, for example, at bento lunch boxes or food processing factories that are highly dependent on human labor.
