Robotic Arm Almost Masters Flipping Pancakes, Mankind Nearly Obsolete

I’m totally on-board with the scientific team behind the robot arm that can flip pancakes and that’s examine what this drone is capable of doing.

Okay so it’s really meant to show off demonstrated motion, trial-and-error and object motion tracking, but with such yummy results those ideas totally escape me.

According to Engadget it’s all about “Expectation-Maximization based Reinforcement Learning” but really it’s about a robotic arm missing the pancake most of the time…so maybe mankind isn’t obsolete, but once this arm masters pancakes it’s on to semi-automatic weaponry and eventually a terminator type near-apocalypse.

Here’s a video of the robotic arm in action:

A robot learning to flip pancakes from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo.