Robot learns to cook pizza by watching videos on the internet

If the robots ever actually do rise up and take our jobs, we may only have ourselves to blame at leastthose of us who shareinformation about how to perform specifichuman tasks online.

Launched in 2012, the EU-funded initiative is called theRoboHow projectand involves researchers from at least nineuniversities across Europe.

The team's ultimate vision is to see home and office robots performing tasks like cooking and cleaning for people, but its focus thus farhas been on the very necessary task of teaching machines how to learn these things first with instructions written inhuman language.

"Instead of programming a robot to perform precise movements, the goal is for a person to simply tell a robot what to do," reads a piece published in the MIT Technology Review earlier this week."So the researchers behind the RoboHow project want to teach robots the general knowledge required to turn high-level instructions into specific actions."

To do this, RoboHow'smachines have been gleaning information frompopular (and sometimes unintentionally hilarious) tutorial siteslike WikiHow.

That's right, robots are now cruising the internetfor recipes, just like you.

It's not as easy as learning the ingredients and steps involved in making pancakes, however.

"Humans amass a certain amount of general knowledge from just getting on with their liveswe don't need to be taught how to hold a spatula or a frying pan, as we've held similarly shaped objects before," explained Quartz. "A robot, on the other hand, needs to be taught everything, from the correct grip and right angle to hold a spatula, to opening a bottle, to what a pancake even is."

To learn these skills, RoboHow's bots view web videos, observe human movement, and participate in haptic demonstrations.

Once they're sufficiently trained, they are able to share the knowledge with otherrobotsin machine-readablelanguage through anonline database calledOpen Ease (or,as Business Insider puts it, a"Wikipediafor robots.")

They can even share knowledge from Open Ease to collaborate on projects, as a PR2 robot recentlydid with another botcalled Boxy at thethe Institute forArtificalIntelligence at the University ofBremen inGermany, where RoboHow is based.

"Raphael, the PR2 robot, was in charge of fetching and bringing tools and ingredients to Boxy, who manipulated the pizza dough, and added the pizza ingredients," reads a description of the experiment on open-ease.org."After the robots were finished, a person comes into the scene, and places the tray with the pizza into the oven for baking it."

Reaction online to the news of self-learning chef bots shows that some people are a bit spooked by the project, butthe concept isn't entirely a far out one given how many of our tasks are already automated by machines.

As VICE notes, "while this development sounds like the peaceful beginning scene of a sci-fi movie plots in which robots eventually become too intelligent,overthrow their human captors,and kill everybody, for now it'sjust another milestone in our civilization'srace to automate pretty much everythingthat we used to have to do ourselves."