The same research group at Cornell has also been working on clever ways to allow robots to efficiently interpret scenes and identify objects, which is one of those things that robots are going to have to be good at before they can really become helpful in our homes. Humans have the ability to look at a scene and immediately pick out important elements while ignoring everything else, because we have brains that are awesome like that. So if you ask a robot go to find you (say) a computer keyboard, it's got to enter a room and methodically search every pixel-equivalent area until it finds what it's looking for. What the Cornell research group has been teaching robots to do is to be able to rapidly break down a scene into general categories, and then recognize how some categories are related to others.
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