This humble robot knows its limitations and asks for help when needed

The Breakthrough

Researchers from the University of Maryland have developed RoboSAM (ROBOtic Smart Assistant for Manufacturing), an industrial robot smart enough to know when something is wrong, to pause and to call a human for help. The new RoboSAM, based on the Baxter industrial robot platform, is able to estimate the probability it can complete a task before beginning it, and can ask a "human on call" for help if necessary.

The Implications

Satyandra Gupta who led the research believes that this work is the beginning of providing a better economic model for deploying robots, especially for small- and medium-sized manufacturing companies. "In most situations, providing task assistance help to robots is much more cost-effective than recovering from a system shutdown, and it enables humans to move from doing dull tasks like monitoring and clean up to more challenging work like helping robots with the tasks with which they struggle."