Affordable robots in just 10 years!

Washington: Tidying a messy room is an everyday thing, but daunting chore. But soon, you could buy yourself a robot that would do all such tasks for you. 

Cornell University Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ashutosh Saxena and his colleagues are working at Cornell's Personal Robotics Lab, which develops software for complex, high-level robotics. 



Among the lab's goals are programming robots that can clean up a dishevelled room, assemble an Ikea bookshelf and load and unload a dishwasher - all without human intervention.

"Just like people buy a car, I envision that in five to 10 years, people will buy an assistive robot that will be cheaper or about the same cost as a car," Saxena said.

“Picking up a pen is one thing. It's quite another to make a robot understand how to pick up an object it's never encountered or navigate a room it's never seen.”

Saxena has researched how to make robots perceive information in cluttered and unknown environments. His work also has enabled robots to estimate depth from a single image.

Using a camera, one robot evaluates an object - say, a cup or plate - and figures out how best to grab it. This technology will eventually integrate into the full-fledged dishwasher-loading robot.