Say hello to your all-rounded robot butler!
Collaborative Dual-arm Robot Manipulator (CURI) has been busy in the kitchen, practicing various cooking tasks like dough rolling. Picture this: a robot rolling out dough with the precision of a seasoned chef, but without the floury mess! While CURI hasn’t cooked actual food yet, the dream is for it to become your personal Michelin-starred chef. Imagine a robot that not only watches but learns and perfects your favourite recipes, delivering dishes so perfectly seasoned, you’ll think it has a secret stash of grandma’s recipes.
Developed at The Chinese University of Hong Kong by Professor Fei Chen, Assistant Professor in the MAE Department, CURI robot is extremely dexterous. It’s as dexterous and smart as a person is, in fact – but, harnessing the power of GenAI, it’s also capable of learning from its observations of human demonstration, and of doing so surprisingly quickly. It can work out how to shake hands with someone after the action is demonstrated to it 5 or 10 times, for example, and is capable of cooking your favourite meal after just 30 demonstrations.
The AI observes a human doing something and decodes the logic behind it; effectively, it is able to work out how humans behave and then do the same thing and generalise to similar scenarios, as many times as it’s asked to, with total accuracy (and, unlike a human, it’s unlikely to complain about having to do so). By doing so, it makes it much easier, more efficient and safer for people and robots to interact and collaborate.
“Our vision is to create a truly general-purpose collaborative humanoid robot capable of performing a wide array of tasks that humans encounter daily,” says Professor Chen. “Our unique approach focuses on teaching the robot skills and abilities to improve through human demonstrations, just like kids, so it can perform more tasks in daily life.”
Developed at CUHK by Prof. Fei Chen, Assistant Professor in MAE, CURI robot is extremely dexterous.
Stir-fry with bimanual arm
Dough rolling
Learn more: CUHK in Touch