Robot learning is not new, but what’s unusual here is that these robots can learn without human supervision, as Phys.Org points out.

Similar research usually requires human overseers to introduce and explain words, or captions, for the robots to parse. RoboWatch, however, needs no human help, save that someone ensure all the videos analyzed fall into a single category (pdf). The idea is that a human could one day tell a robot to perform a task and then the robot would independently research and learn how to carry out that task.

So next time you getting frustrated watching a video on how to change a tire, don’t fret. Soon, a robot will do all that for you. We just have to make sure it doesn’t watch any videos about “how to take over the world.”

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