Italian robot learns archery
The month of September ended with an interesting development at the Italian Institute of Technologyone that probably has more ramifications for robotics than for archery, but it still bears mentioning here. Italian scientists taught a robot named iCub not just to shoot an arrow, but to actually learn how to do so. Through a program algorithm known as ARCHERshort for Augmented Reward Chained RegressioniCub practiced with a toy bow and rapidly developed his skills. It took it only eight tries to be able to hit the bullseye. For those of you worried by this development, you can take heart in the fact that the scientists had to re-slot the arrow after each shotcurrently. They’re working on teaching iCub to do that by itself, as well. Hopefully this interesting new development doesn’t backfire on usfor now, it remains an impressive step forward in robotic learning techniques.