I’m sure that you are probably seeing this headline and thinking: “Okay, someone invented a robot that can play catch.” If you aren’t thinking “so what” after that, I don’t blame you.

Let’s start with the facts. This is from Ecole Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), and it is a robot arm with good reaction time, and has cameras to figure out the path of a flying object so it can snatch it.

So here is the “so what”. Not only does this robot catch, but the purpose is to teach robots when to catch. In other words, someone is teaching robots to have reflexes. This means that you can teach a robot to react while driving, you know, in case you ever want to do that.

This is actually kind of interesting. I think that it is interesting that humans can be taught to react to a catching ball. I can’t but wonder if we really can’t teach a robot to think like a human.

I’m pretty certain we all thought this couldn’t be done. Well, our science fiction books taught us this, didn’t it? Maybe we can to teach our robots to think.

Source