Wow! It Takes 13 Hours To Teach Robot To Peel Banana Correctly

The robot is learning to peel a banana properly. (photo: arxiv screenshot)

JAKARTA - Most people can easily peel a banana, even for kids. A task that seems easy for humans is apparently very difficult for most robots to do.

Robots often lack the dexterity to peel bananas without crushing the delicate fruit inside in the peeling process.

Bots are robots trained by machine learning to imitate human demonstrations. He managed to peel the banana even though it had to be done in three minutes.

This robot has two arms and hands, each with two 'fingers' that can grip objects.

To train it, a patient researcher peeled hundreds of bananas for more than 13 hours, to generate enough data to train the robot to do it on its own.

"Given the complexity of the target banana peel task, we thought the 13 hours of the demonstration was worth it," the researchers wrote in their study, published in arXiv.

While it may seem easy to humans, the researchers simplified the robot's task by breaking it down into nine stages. This includes grasping the banana, picking it up from the table, grabbing the ends, and peeling them.

After the researchers trained the robot, they tested it on a pile of bananas. They found that Bots managed to peel bananas without mashing them by 57 percent. On average, the entire process took less than three minutes per trial.

As well as being a bit of fun, the researchers hope the technology behind the robots can be applied in the future to other tasks that require fine motor skills.

The banana peeler isn't the only food-based device to be revealed in recent weeks.

A Swiss team has been working on Bouebot, a robot that can prepare the perfect cheese fondue.

The robot, which cost up to £240,000 to develop, pours white wine into the classic Vacherin Fribourgeois and Gruyere fondue mix.

Bouebot then stirs in a “figure eight” fashion as the cheese melts, then sprinkles with pepper to finish.

He then took a metal nail, pierced a loaf of bread, and set it in place for fondue lovers to try before the sticky cheese dripped down.

The bot is being developed by the team at Workshop 4.0, based in Sierre, who manipulate it using a control board.