System Enables Robots to Understand Contextual Commands

Today’s robots can accomplish many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests. For example, if a specific tool is placed in a toolbox and a robot is asked to “pick it up,” it would be completely lost. Picking it up means being able to see and identify objects, understand commands, recognize that the “it” in question is the tool, go back in time to remember the moment when the tool was put down, and distinguish that tool from other ones of similar shapes and sizes.