A robot that learned to manipulate clay to make letters of the alphabet without any training could one day make dumplings for you
Technology
24 June 2022
A robot has learned how to mould modelling clay into letters that it has never seen before. Creating complex shapes out of doughy materials is a skill that could be put to use in the future in the form of a dumpling-making robot chef.
“Deformable objects are ubiquitous in our daily life,” says Yunzhu Li at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robots capable of gently handling such objects could one day cook, do housework or even help care for elderly people, he says.
Li and his colleagues trained a robot to use two metal grippers to mould the approximate shapes …
