Kitchen robots are a popular vision of the future, but if a robot of today tries to grasp a kitchen staple such as a clear measuring cup or a shiny knife, it likely won’t be able to. Transparent and reflective objects are the things of robot nightmares. Roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University, however, report success with a new technique they’ve developed for teaching robots to pick up these troublesome objects.
Transparent, reflective objects now within grasp of robots: Researchers teach robots to infer shapes from color images
