Putting the long-held belief that robots are programmed rigid is a new robot that can learn to adapt to its injury! Cornell researchers have built a robot that quite like a human baby teaches itself to walk. Then, when damaged, it teaches itself to limp.

Instead of giving the robot a rigid set of instructions, the researchers let it discover its own nature and work out how to control itself, a process that seems to resemble the way human and animal babies discover and manipulate their bodies. The ability to build this “self-model” is what makes it able to adapt to injury.

Toshiba presented an attendant robot ‘ApriAlpha V3’ for elderly people in Toshiba’s 130th anniversary exhibition. ‘ApriAlpha V3’ can perceive and identify sounds from every direction by using 6 mikes built inside. It also employs TOSHIBA’s exclusive ‘Voice Signal Processing’, so the robot can respond to greeting of a person and answer a question of another person right away. Its visual sensor and high speed image processing help to identify color and textures of the clothes that people wear. If he meets a person wearing particular clothes that he already has information, he starts to follow him and stops when he reaches the person. When he misses the person, he examines the information again.