There’s no question that robotics is transforming our world. Thanks to computerized machines, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, supply chains, retail, automotive, construction, and other industries are seeing rapidly increasing efficiencies and new capabilities.
One challenge with bringing new robots online is that it’s hard, expensive, and time-consuming to train them for the task at hand. Once you’ve trained them, you have to retrain them with every minor tweak to the system. Robots are capable, but highly inflexible.
Some of the training is handled by software coding. Other methods use imitation learning, where a person teleoperates a robot (which, during training, essentially functions as a puppet) to kickstart data for robot movement.