Researchers are designing robots that are capable of expressing what they aren’t capable of doing Image: Cornell & UC Berkeley With some limited exceptions, robots are terrible at doing almost everything that humans take for granted. For people who work with robots, this is normal and expected, but for everyone else, it’s not immediately clear just how terrible robots are, especially if the robot in question looks human-like enough to generate expectations of human-like capability. Bimanual mobile manipulators like PR2 are particularly bad, because with heads and bodies and arms, it’s easy to look at them and think that they should have no problem doing all kinds of things. And then, of course, comes the inevitable disappointment when you realize that (among other things) round doorknobs make for an impassable obstacle. At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) earlier this month, researchers from Cornell and UC Berkeley presented Continue reading Helping Robots Express Themselves When They Fail→