The University of Pennsylvania has taught the $400,000 dollar Willow Garage PR2 robotic platform to read. In a similar way to the method humans learn to read, the bot, named Graspy, learns to recognize the shape of words and letters and associates them with sounds. Then meanings get attached with those sounds. The team states that the word recognition software Graspy uses outstrips current systems due to its ability to learn. At the moment, Graspy has issues distinguishing letters between various fonts. The team will seek to expand the processing power of the image/word recognition portion of the bot. May I suggest a cloud computing option, Penn-U? The software the team developed is available for all ROS based robot platforms online for downloading. There is something endearing about watching Graspy roll around reading any text it can find, or perhaps it brings out my nostalgia for the Short Circuit films.
Eavesdropper
