Nov 29 2010
A team of roboticists, headed by Dr Ingmar Posner of Oxford University and Peter Corke of Queensland University of Technology, are working on releasing a new range of literate robots with artificial intelligence. They had stated that these robots, named Marge, will be highly beneficial in the upcoming years and would be rather easy to develop because already computers convert scanned books into text.
The research team had included the latest optical character recognition (OCR) reading software in the trial Marge robots. The previous archetype model has also been incorporated with a spell checker and dictionary for enabling it to understand ambiguously written text.
The researchers believe that this recent technology can be deployed in rescue tasks and to determine the direction of movement inside buildings from symbols.
According to Dr Posner, a machine with literacy skills will be a major step ahead. He stated that reading a labeled closed door will facilitate easy understanding of what lies behind it, thereby helping to identify things better, which cannot be seen directly. He added that the OCR software does not furnish for the concept that it would not be viewing the text but translates everything into text.
On the other hand, the major problem faced by Marge is that it cannot interpret text written on curvatures.
After reading the text, the robot examines news websites to view its content and find out its meaning. Marge has already established that Strada is a restaurant and Barclays is a bank.
Gregory Dudek has stated that deploying OCR technology in mobile robots is a sensible approach and will be highly beneficial.
Source: http://www.ox.ac.uk