“Typically, robots respond well to precise instruction sets but they are flummoxed if their instructions are given in the fuzzy, everyday language so beloved by humans. Now, a team at the University of Washington in Seattle has developed translation software which could enable robots to understand a set of natural-language directions …
“Cynthia Matuszek and her colleagues used the principles of machine translation – commonly used online to translate text of one language into another – to develop a navigation program for robots. Machine translation tools are designed to learn from previous efforts, improving their accuracy through experience.”
Read “Parlez-vous robot?” here.