Robot self aware through ‘proprioception’

Self awareness is typically a human trait; however there are some animals display a bit of insight like dolphins, chimps, and elephants. But what about robots? Would they all band together in some kind of post human society after the war? Or would they finally figure out that we can hurt them? Jivko Sinapov from the Developmental Robotics Laboratory at Iowa State is using a method called proprioceptive sensory feedback with a PR2 robot to tackle the concept of object perception. Proprioception is a sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the rest of the parts of the body are in relation to each other. How this sense translates to robots, in this case a PR2, is it gives object perception detected through the use of joint motor efforts rather than visual input. Sinapov used a proprioceptive subroutine to help the PR2 learn the differences in bottle weight. The robot was then able to determine if say, a Pepsi bottle was full or empty and after introducing a ‘sorting’ subroutine, the PR2 was successfully able to sort between full or empty bottles with a 100% success rate. It would seem that robot recyclers are going to help us save the planet or will be able to tidy it up after the upcoming robot war.