It’s pretty needless to have a robot maître d’ take orders in an autonomous restaurant–beyond novelty, of course–but a Robohow project that’s used Wikihow instructions to train machines in this function demonstrates how customizable and flexible AI may become: One machine that can be taught different tasks depending on need.

From Michelle Starr at Cnet:

The team has been using the website WikiHow as a robotic learning tool. It turns out that WikiHow’s step-by-step instructions are perfect for breaking down an activity into its component tasks, and teaching robots to understand verbal, rather than programmed, commands.

To date, they have trained the Willow Garage PR2 robot to make pancakes and pizza using WikiHow. They have also taught a robot named Rosie to make sandwiches and popcorn. This is part of a broader mission to advance machine learning, as well as teach robots how to perform human-scale manipulation activities that can be spoken by an operator, an interface anyone can use.

The latest step in this research involves the humanoid robot Romeo from Aldebaran robotics. Romeo has been trained to act as a waiter, greeting and taking a food order from a human “customer” in a restaurant simulation.•