Operating a Microwave Oven after Reading the Manual Special Show of USTC Service Robot Kejia in CHTF

The 12th China Hi-tech Fair (CHTF) was held on November 16 to 21 in Shenzhen. USTC robot team caught widely public attention. The intelligent service robot KeJia operated a microwave oven after read the manual, and response to customers service requests by analyzing.

KeJia repeated the activity dozens of times in public. Viewers sent oral Chinese commands to KeJia, requesting her to heat milk and bread as breakfast. In the beginning, KeJia had insufficiency knowledge about the microwave oven, for example, she didn t know the functions of the buttons on the control panel.

When the user suggested her "reading the manual", KeJia immediately browsed and downloaded the manual from the internet, read the manual in Chinese and learnt the relevant knowledge. Then KeJia managed to plan a series of actions and finished the entire task by using the microwave oven to heat food.

The actions she executed included opening the microwave oven door, putting the food into the microwave oven, closing the door, pushing button "Start/Re-heat" to start heating, pushing button "Pause/Cancel" to stop heating, opening the oven and finally bringing the heated food to the user. In the process, KeJia checked her actions of pushing buttons by monitoring the readings on the digital screen, and took remedial actions when necessary.

KeJia also showed learning ability of demonstration learning . First, let the robot observed how the "teacher" made multiple presentations, each presentation including teacher acted with a series of actions, with head nodding or shaking to show whether the activity was right or wrong. The robot learned the correct behavior mode by analyzing. Then the robot was able to respond to user s service requests. Demonstration Learning" lead the robot s observation in the learning process, doing good for obtaining the knowledge which could not be fully expressed in language.

KeJia is an cross-disciplinary and cross -school cooperation result of USTC robotics team, which means that USTC have made a series of encouraging progress in artificial intelligence, a systematic exploration of the core technology and the basic theory. The results indicate that based on the architecture and technology, hopefully in the future, intelligent robots would be enabled to autonomously acquire knowledge expressed in natural languages and thereby incrementally improve their performance on general-purpose services.

To see the demo video, click here.

(News Center of USTC)