Cornell University’s Stabbing Robot Learning To Be Less (Or More?) Stabby

Gotta practice my stabbin’.

Cornell University has a robot which is just a little too stabby. (Is it named Fourvel?) They decided to teach it, through trial and error, how to be less dangerous around sharp objects. We would not want to be the test subjects for that, especially the “error” part.

Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, and his team have created a system for fixing robotic motions. […] The system uses trajectory mapping (the robot decides on three potentially un-stabby motions) and the human selects the best one and moves the robot in order to ensure minimal stabbage. [TechCrunch]

OR, it’ll teach the robot exactly what humans don’t like in order to ensure maximum stabbage. THANKS, CORNELL.

Cornell’s robot joins a rogues’ gallery of stabbing robots including Carnegie Mellon’s Oreo separator, this German stab-happy robot, Mayekawa Electric’s meat-carving robot, and Borut Povše’s Epson.

Here’s a video of the newest stabbing robot in action.

Okay, that was actually from the masterpiece Exterminator City. Here’s the real video:

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