Japanese scientists are developing a robot that reacts by making educated guesses based on past experiencesmeaning it can think, learn, and react just like humans.

Created by the Hasegawa Lab of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the robot was built upon an "unsupervised" learning mechanism called Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN), which takes in dynamic information and enables the robot to estimate future patterns and networks.

In the demonstration below, a camera-strapped robot is tasked with pouring a cup of water. Sounds easy, but the robot was never programmed to do so in the specific, controlled situation presented.

The robot successfully locates and identifies items on a table and figures out what should be done with them. In the end, it successfully pours a cup of water, sets it down on a coaster, and then adds a block of ice. It stores information learned from the new experiences for future use.

"So far robots, including industrial robots, have been able to do specific tasks quickly and accurately. But if their environment changes slightly, robots like that can't respond," explains a researcher in an interview with Diginfonews. "This robot remembers only basic knowledge and it can apply that knowledge to its immediate situation."

Future applications are endless, especially since SOINN allows robots to learn from sources like the Internet and other robots. For instance, as the researcher notes innocently, if a robot is ordered to make English tea (black tea with milk) and the robot is only familiar with making green tea, the robot will know to obtain information from a robot in Britain.

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