El-E Makes The World Point ‘N Click
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 4 of May , 2009 at 3:18 am
Telling a robot to go get you what you want can be complicated and cumbersome, but if there’s one thing robots are good at, it’s following simple and straightforward instructions. El-E, a robot developed by Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics lab, only really knows how to respond to one command: fetch. Using a laser pointer, a human can designate an object to be picked up. El-E reads the position of the object, and then grasps it using a dynamically adjustable gripper. Telling El-E what to do with the object is just as simple… “Clicking” a spot on the floor with the laser tells El-E to move to that spot. Clicking on a flat surface tells El-E to place the object there. And if you click on or near a person, El-E can recognize that and hand the object directly to the person.
This whole clickable world system is far from complicated, but that’s what’s so nice about it: it’s a straightforward operation for both the robot and the human that despite its simplicity just works for most of the tasks for which it has been designed.
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