A machine could peel a banana for you

Although robots in Japan are found on factory floors carrying out simple tasks, scientists have now unveiled one capable of executing the delicate task of peeling a banana without squashing the fruit inside.

While the dual-armed machine is only successful 57% of the time, this points to a future where machines undertake tasks like moving metal parts or perhaps delivering coffee or tea.

The dual-armed robot picks up a banana and peels it without squashing the fruit in Tokyo

A dual-armed robot picks up a banana and peels it without squashing the fruit inside during a demonstration that was released by ISI (Kuniyoshi) Lab., School of Info. Sci & Tech., The University of Tokyo, Japan.

Researchers Heecheol Kim, Yoshiyuki Ohmura and Yasuo Kuniyoshi trained the robot using a “deep imitation learning” process where they demonstrated the banana-peeling action hundreds of times to produce sufficient data for the robot to learn the actions and replicate them.

In this case, the banana reached its success rate after more than 13 hours of training.

While still undergoing more testing, Kuniyoshi believes his robot training method can teach robots to do different simple “human” tasks.

He hopes the better-trained robots can alleviate Japan’s labour shortage problems, for example at bento lunch boxes or food processing factories that are highly dependent on human labour.

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