Communication is key

Tell Me Dave is a large, vaguely humanoid bot that can cook simple meals according to spoken instructions. But programming Tell Me Dave to understand even one kind of order is tricky: humans have an annoying tendency to ask for the same thing in a variety of different ways, or to combine several discrete steps into one short command. So Ashutosh Saxena and his colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, turned to crowdsourcing to help Tell Me Dave understand these complex requests. They developed a computer game in which human players are placed in a virtual kitchen and asked to follow a set of sample instructions, much like the robot would. These games are used to train the algorithm that guides Tell Me Dave, so when it's later faced with commands like "boil some water" or "cook the ramen" in a real kitchen, it can come up with the appropriate actions. So far, the robot gets it right about two-thirds of the time.